MESSENGER – From Setbacks to Success | Space

The excerpts below are taken from Discovery Program oral history interviews conducted in 2009 by Dr. Susan Niebur and tell the story of the hurdles the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) mission team faced with the technical requirements of visiting Mercury, budget challenges, and schedule impacts —all while keeping their mission goals in mind on the way to launch.

The MESSENGER mission followed a long road from conception to launch with multiple detours and obstacles along the way. First conceived by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) after NASA’s 1996 Discovery Program Announcement of Opportunity, the mission to Mercury proposal, if accepted, would be the first spacecraft to visit the planet since Mariner 10’s flybys in 1974. A critical step for APL was finding the right principal investigator (PI) to lead the mission.

Andrew F. Cheng, MESSENGER Co-Investigator

“There’s not that many people out there, especially in the early days when the PI [principal investigator-led] mission paradigm itself was just getting set up. You didn’t want to screw up. You didn’t want to have a problem. …Scientific qualifications are necessary, but that’s not even the biggest part of it. It’s knowing something about missions and seeing how they work with engineers and also how they handle Headquarters and…