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After a decade long trip in space, a NASA spacecraft will impact Mercury’s surface after it runs out of propellant.
The estimated impact date is April 30th and according to NASA, the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) will impact the planet at more than 8,750 miles per hour on the side of the planet facing away from Earth.
Photo credit: NASA.
Unfortunately, this expected impact location means engineers won’t be able to view the crash in real time.
On Tuesday, mission operators at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, completed the fourth in a series of orbit correction maneuvers designed to delay the spacecraft’s impact on Mercury.
"Following this last maneuver, we will finally declare the spacecraft out of propellant, as this maneuver will deplete nearly all of our remaining helium gas,” said Daniel O’Shaughnessy, mission systems engineer at APL. “At that point, the spacecraft will no longer be capable of fighting the downward push of the sun's gravity.”
MESSENGER traveled more than six and a half years before it finally made its way into orbit around Mercury on March 18th, 2011. The objective of the space craft was to collect data for one Earth year.
Some findings suggest that Mercury harbours an abundant supply of frozen water and other volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters.
“The water now stored in ice deposits in the permanently shadowed floors of impact craters at Mercury’s poles most likely was delivered to the innermost planet by the impacts of comets and volatile-rich asteroids,” said Sean Solomon, the mission’s principal investigator, and director of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. “Those same impacts also likely delivered the dark organic material.”
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