NASA’s MESSENGER mission comes to an end
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.028829
New York Times : After more than a decade of service, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft is expected to crash into Mercury’s surface on 30 April. Launched in 2004, MESSENGER successfully completed three flybys of Mercury before entering the planet’s orbit in March 2011. Over the past four years, MESSENGER has discovered volcanoes, a magnetic field like Earth’s, and water ice in craters near the planet’s poles. It has also revealed that Mercury shrank over billions of years and is rich in volatile elements, such as chlorine, sulfur, potassium, and sodium. Before MESSENGER, the only spacecraft to have flown near Mercury was NASA’s Mariner 10 in the 1970s. The next Mercury mission will be a European and Japanese collaboration called BepiColombo, scheduled to launch in 2017 and arrive at Mercury in 2024.
