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

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.

Comments

Backro-tastic

[Ralph Wiggam]

Can we take a second and thank the person who came up with the fantastic backronym "Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging" for MESSENGER.

For those that don't know, Mercury was the messenger of the Gods.