Dec 15 2009
From The Space Library
NASA announced its partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), to collaborate in lunar and asteroid science research. The Saudi Lunar and Near-Earth Object Science Center would become an affiliate partner with the NASA Lunar Science Institute at NASA’s ARC. The partnership fell within the scope of a MOU on Science and Technology, which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States had signed in 2008. U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James B. Smith recognized the partnership as an important advance in the growing U.S.-Saudi program of bilateral science and technology cooperation.
NASA, “NASA Partners with Saudi Arabia on Moon and Asteroid Research,” news release 09-284, 15 December 2009, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/dec/HQ_09-284_NASA-Saudi_statement.html (accessed 16 December 2011).
At the American Geophysical Union meeting, members of NASA’s MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U.S. Geological Survey released the first global map of Mercury. The team had built the map from 917 images that NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft had collected as recently as 29 September 2009 and from earlier images that Mariner 10 had captured in the 1970s. Scientists planned to use the map as a critical tool to help identify Mercury’s craters, faults, and other features. MESSENGER would use this information in its observations, when the craft entered Mercury’s orbit in 2011. MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean C. Solomon remarked that, beyond its use as a planning tool, the global map signified that MESSENGER was no longer a flyby mission. Instead, MESSENGER would soon become an in-depth, nonstop global observatory of the solar system’s innermost planet.
Alexis Madrigal, “First Global Map of Mercury,” Wired, 16 December 2009; Nancy Atkinson, “MESSENGER Team Releases First Global Map of Mercury,” Universe Today, 16 December 2009.
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