MESSENGER/FIPS

The Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) instrument on MESSENGER is
part of the Engergetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer (EPPS). FIPS
measures particle count rates, energy distributions, velocity vector
distributions, and mass spectra at a high time resolution (64s) and
between 50 eV/e and 20 keV/e in energy. The instrument is a
time-of-flight mass spectrometer, pre-filtered with an electrostatic
analyzer.

MESSENGER spacecraft was launched on August 3, 2004 aboard a Boeing
Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. MESSENGER is
the first spacecraft to visit planet Mercury since Mariner 10 in
1975. MESSENGER is working its way to Mercury Orbit Insertion (MOI) in March 2011, on a surprisingly complex trajectory which includes flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself (3 times).

News

MESSENGER Third Mercury Flyby

1 Oct 2009 -- The MESSENGER spacecraft made it's third and final flyby of Mercury on Tuesday (29Sep2009) before going into orbit March 2011. While the crucial gravity assist was successfully achieved, science data collection was interrupted by a power problem early in the flyby. This severely limited the amount of data returned for our FIPS instrument, and several others. For details on the flyby, see the MESSENGER site.