University of Colorado at 麻豆影院 Senior Research Associate Bill McClintock will participate in a NASA media teleconference on Thursday, July 3, to discuss new findings from the most recent flyby of Mercury by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.
McClintock of CU-麻豆影院's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics led the instrument development team for the $8.7 million Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, a CU-麻豆影院 instrument riding on MESSENGER as it looped within 125 miles of Mercury's surface Jan. 14. McClintock is one of four MESSENGER scientists who will participate in the noon MDT media teleconference to discuss new evidence of volcanism, the origins of Mercury's magnetic field and the composition of the bizarre planet's tenuous atmosphere.
The new results are being published in 11 papers in the July 4 issue of Science.
McClintock will join MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and MESSENGER co-investigators James Head of Brown University and Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan and NASA program scientist Marilyn Lindstrom. Media interested in participating in the teleconference should call 1-888-455-3616 and use the pass code "messenger." Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at .
Launched in 2004, the car-sized MESSENGER spacecraft is carrying seven instruments, including a camera, a magnetometer, an altimeter and four spectrometers. The circuitous, 4.9 billion-mile journey to achieve Mercury orbit requires more than six years and 15 loops around the sun.
The spacecraft is managed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA. For more information on the MESSENGER mission, including images, photos, animation and videos, visit the Web at /. For more information about LASP, visit the Web at /. For further information contact Jim Scott in the CU-麻豆影院 news office at 303-492-3114.