MESSENGER
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The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission is designed to orbit Mercury following one Earth flyby, two flybys of Venus and three of Mercury. It launched in August 2004 and will use these flybys to achieve an orbit insertion around Mercury in March 2011. Initial data collection will begin during the three flybys of Mercury, and will primarily consist of global mapping and measurements of the surface, atmosphere and magnetosphere composition. MESSENGER will remain in orbit for the rest of the nominal mission, which is scheduled to end in March 2012. Once in orbit around Mercury it will begin a series of observations using multiple instruments. These observations will provide data to answer questions about the nature and composition of the crust, tectonic history, the structure of the atmosphere andmagnetosphere, and the nature of the polar caps.
The science objectives of the MESSENGER Magnetometer (MAG) are to determine the structure and the origin of the intrinsic magnetic field of Mercury, and to characterize the solar-wind interaction with the planet. The magnetic field data are also needed tointerpret data from the Energetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer.
The MAG instrument is a miniature three-axis ring-core fluxgate magnetometer with low-noise electronics. It is mounted on a 3.6 m boom in the anti-sunward direction. The MAG has +/- 1530 and +/- 51300 nT ranges with 20-bit internal resolution and 17-bit output resolution. The MAG probe samples magnetic field values along the X, Y, and Z axes at a rate of 20 samples/second. The data passesthrough an A/D converter where it is also filtered by the hardware.
The MAG software interfaces with the MAG electronics via memory-mapped I/O for data collection, range control, andelectronics calibration.
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