NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has crashed into the surface of Mercury, ending its historic 11-year mission that provided valuable data and thousands of images of the planet.
Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland confirmed that the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (Messenger) spacecraft impacted the surface of Mercury, as predicted, on Thursday.
Messenger, launched on August 3, 2004, began orbiting Mercury on March 18, 2011. The spacecraft completed its primary science objectives by March 2012.
Because Messenger’s initial discoveries raised important new questions and the payload remained healthy, the mission was extended twice.
Last month — during a final short extension of the mission referred to as XM2 — the team embarked on a hover campaign that allowed the spacecraft at its closest approach to operate within a narrow band of 5-35 kilometres above the planet’s surface.
On April 28, the team successfully executed the last of seven orbit-correction manoeuvres, which had been keeping Messenger aloft for the additional month, sufficiently long enough for its instruments to collect critical information that could shed light on Mercury’s crustal magnetic anomalies and ice-filled polar craters.
With no way to increase its altitude, Messenger was unable to resist the perturbations to its orbit by the sun’s gravitational pull and slammed into Mercury’s surface at around 14,000 kmph, creating a crater up to 52 feet wide.
