Bob Strom had begun to lose hope.
A veteran of NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s, he was bursting with questions that the Mariner flybys had raised about the little planet but couldn't answer.
"I've been hoping for another Mercury mission for 30 years, practically," said Strom, an expert on impact craters. But for decades, NASA seemed unable to make it happen.
FOR THE RECORD - An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun about NASA's Messenger mission to Mercury quoted University of Arizona scientist Bob Strom describing an emotional "Hillary moment" when he saw new pictures from the planet. In editing, the reference was made to say a "Sir Edmund" Hillary moment. Strom was referring to Hillary Clinton.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
"I really thought ... I'd never live to see Mercury again," he said.
But he did.
This week, NASA's Messenger spacecraft whizzed past Mercury and sent back more than 1,200 photos and measurements from the sun's nearest neighbor, and Strom was in the thick of it.
At 74, he is the only member of the old Mariner 10 team serving on the Messenger science team. He has been holed up in the mission's Science Operations Center, at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab near Laurel, marveling over the new data from Mercury.
It's no wonder. He's was captivated half a lifetime ago by Mercury, its oddities and mysteries. And he has written two books on the subject while waiting for a new mission to go back there.
"He's jumping for joy," said Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, principal investigator on the project.
"It's superlative after superlative. With each image, he sees terrain he spent decades wondering if he'd ever get a chance to see. There are grad students 50 years his junior, working side by side to compare interpretations.
"Today, he's like a kid," Solomon said.
Strom, an emeritus professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona at Tucson, is supposed to be retired, but he has so much more to do.
He plans to be back when Messenger flies by Mercury again in October, and again in September 2009 as it uses the planet's gravity as a brake. By the time it finally settles into orbit around the planet in 2011, he'll be 77. And when the primary mission ends, he'll be 78.
"I know I'm getting old," he said. But it doesn't seem to matter. Not this week. "I'm working harder than I did when I was fully employed. But it's fun."
He can hardly believe his good fortune.
"It's so great," he said. "I got very emotional yesterday when I first saw the side [of Mercury] we haven't seen. My God, I waited so many years! So I had a kind of [Sir Edmund] Hillary moment. It was just overwhelming, emotionally, to see this."
The images and data coming from Mercury were scientifically overwhelming as well.
