NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has left Maryland for Cape Canaveral, Fla., site of its scheduled May 11 launch toward Mercury and the first study of that planet from orbit.

Secured in an air-conditioned moving van, MESSENGER arrived March 10 at Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral Air Force Station from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where it had spent three months being baked, frozen, spun, shaken and probed to experiencing the conditions of launch and its upcoming five-year journey to the innermost planet.

Over the next several weeks, engineers from the Applied Physics Laboratory, where MESSENGER was designed and built, will prepare the spacecraft for launch at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near Kennedy Space Center. Other team members will continue to test the spacecraft's key operating systems remotely from the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at APL.

Set for a predawn launch aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket, MESSENGER will fly past Venus three times and Mercury twice before starting its yearlong orbital study of Mercury in July 2009. MESSENGER is the next launch in NASA's Discovery Program of lower cost, highly focused space science investigations. Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington is principal investigator; APL manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science. For more information on the mission, go to messenger.jhuapl.edu.
--Michael Buckley

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