APL's Elliot Rodberg answers questions from middle school students as they look in on the MESSENGER spacecraft during the Oct. 10 Space Academy event at APL.

The Space Academy series — sponsored by APL, Comcast Cable and Discovery Networks — takes students behind the scenes of APL space missions and introduces them to the engineers and scientists who run the projects. The day's event focused on the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging spacecraft — or MESSENGER — now under construction at APL and scheduled for launch in May 2004. MESSENGER will orbit Mercury for a year starting in July 2009, snapping pictures and yielding new scientific information about the innermost planet.

The students, from schools in Montgomery, Prince George's and Calvert counties, took part in a "press conference" with MESSENGER scientist Andy Cheng, lead mechanical engineer Ted Hartka and mission operations manager Bob Nelson. Later in the day they learned how to put on a clean-room suit, before getting special replica "white" suits of their own, received demonstrations of the Lab's space-environment testing facilities and looked in on the MESSENGER spacecraft.
— Michael Buckley

For more on the mission, including a live Webcam view of MESSENGER's assembly, go to messenger.jhuapl.edu.

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