How to follow MESSENGER's orbit insertion today

Posted By Emily Lakdawalla

2011/03/17 02:11 CDT

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The day is finally here! In only five and a half hours, at 00:45 on March 18 (according to the spacecraft's clock), MESSENGER must ignite its main engine and run though a third of its fuel in only 15 minutes in order to enter its planned orbit around Mercury. One-way light time will be about 9 minutes, so it'll be about 00:54 (just before 6 p.m., my time) when the Deep Space Network antennas in Canberra that'll be tracking MESSENGER's signal should hopefully see the Doppler shift in MESSENGER's broadcast frequency that'll signal that the burn is happening.~~I erred previously in saying that NASA TV would be covering this -- they won't.~~ Turns out NASA TV will, in fact, be broadcasting tonight. Sigh.

So here is how I plan to follow MESSENGER's Mercury Orbit Insertion (referred to as "MOI" by acronym-happy NASA types):

Daniel Muller's realtime countdown clock (which includes key events other than the moment of orbit insertion), running now
Eyes on the Solar System's realtime visual simulation complements Daniel's text-based clock nicely. You can choose whether to view it in spacecraft event time or Earth received time (Earth received time is spacecraft event time plus one-way light time).
Twitter, following the hashtag #MOI2011; the official mission Twitter account is @MESSENGER2011
MESSENGER's website, which will begin a live webcast at 23:55 UTC / 4:55 p.m. PDT according to the mission website, but 23:30 / 4:30 according to Twitter; I'll certainly be tuned in at the earlier time.
I'll have NASA TV on as well.
I'll also probably check in on the mission's Facebook page from time to time.

I linked to the official mission timeline before, but here's a short version, of the key events I'll be looking for this evening.

Time (SCET, UTC)	Time (ERT, PDT)	Event
00:15	17:24	Turn spacecraft to burn attitude and configure attitude control for burn execution
00:25	17:34	Configure solar arrays for burn execution
00:40	17:49	Configure spacecraft fault protection for burn execution
00:45	17:54	Engine ignition
01:00	18:09	Engine shutdown
01:12	18:12	Turn to Earth and acquire post-maneuver data
01:23	18:32	Reconfigure spacecraft systems for normal post-maneuver operations