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NASA's MESSENGER Mission To Crash Into Mercury In 2 Weeks

Posted by Soulskill on from the take-that,-mercury dept.

astroengine writes: NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft is in the final days of an unprecedented and unexpectedly long-lived, close-up study of the innermost planet of the solar system, with a crashing finale expected in two weeks. Out of fuel, the robotic Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, or MESSENGER, probe on April 30 will succumb to the gravitational pull of this strange world that has been its home since March 2011. The purpose of the mission, originally designed to last one year, is to collect detailed geochemical and other data that will help scientists piece together of how Mercury formed and evolved. "MESSENGER is going to create a new crater on Mercury sometime in the near future ... let's not be sad about that," NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld said Thursday. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has an excellent site for looking through the pictures MESSENGER has taken and the science it's done.

3 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. "succumb to the gravitational pull"??? by idji · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When will people stop talking about gravity is it it is in a struggle with object X and eventually it wins. People constantly talk about "Black Holes" sucking in, "inevitable"....
    MESSENGER did NOT run out of fuel and SUCCUMB to the gravitation pull of Mercury. Mercury ran out of fuel and continued on it's gravitationally influenced trajectory which was chosen to crash it. they could have left it in an eternal orbit if they wanted too - and the journalist would probably say it "did not succumb" to gravity - which is equally nonsensical. Gravity did not some get the upper hand because this spacecraft ran out of fuel. That craft will always be influenced by Mercury's gravity, no matter how many fragments it smashes into, unless a fragment gets an upwards speed of more than 4.3km/s, in which case it will ESCAPE Mercury's gravity.

    1. Re:"succumb to the gravitational pull"??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The pull of the Sun perturbing the orbit of something that close to Mercury causes the orbit's periapsis to lose altitute. Seems like he's correct, maybe just worded awkwardly.

    2. Re:"succumb to the gravitational pull"??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Range of eccentricities and timescales involved in the Kozai mechanism depends strongly on the parameters of the Mercury-Sun orbit, and weakly on the orbit of the satellite. They would have had to move the satellite considerable distance away from Mercury, used a very circular orbit, and/or put it into an orbit aligned with the Mercury-Sun orbit. Most of its propellant was used by the time it finished orbital insertion. It would not have had enough fuel to make a large orbit change at this point, and small changes would only delay the mechanism's process by a couple years. They would have had to fundamentally change the project from the start, including scrapping studying of the poles that previous probes did poorly at, and scrapping any close study that required elliptical orbits.