MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) is a NASA Discovery mission to study the planet Mercury. Launched in August 2004, it will perform one more flyby of Venus and three flybys of Mercury, followed by Mercury orbit insertion in 2011 for a one-year science-gathering mission. Throughout the mission, MESSENGER will use seven instruments to collect data about key characteristics of the planet to understand Mercury and the formation of the inner solar system. With the requirement that MESSENGER operate at distances of tens of millions of kilometers from Earth, the flight software team at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) designed a system software architecture to work within the confines of deep space as well as the hostile near-Sun environment of Mercury. The constraints imposed by this setting include limited on-board storage, low bandwidth, long light-time delays, and intermittent connectivity with Earth.


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    Title :

    Messenger: Flight Software Design for a Deep Space Mission




    Publication date :

    2007-03-01


    Size :

    492619 byte





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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