NASA's Messenger on a Death Dive Towards Mercury's Surface
After years of studying the planet, NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (Messenger) spacecraft will go on a death dive at the surface of Mercury on April 30 when it runs out of propellant. The said spacecraft were the first to capture the first images of ice found on Mercury.
Launched in August 2004, the spacecraft travelled for 7.8 billion kilometer (4.9 billion miles) in a span of more than a decade. The spacecraft spent six and a half years of travelling before it started orbiting and collecting data from Mercury. Data collection lasted for one Earth year.
According to University of Michigan's Thomas Zurbuchen, "We're at the end of a really successful mission, and we can't do anything anymore to stop it from doing what it naturally wants to do. The sun is pulling on it. The planet is pulling on it. It's just physics. It has to crash."
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The mission was initially to study the first rock from the sun. Still, the mission was indeed successful as the spacecraft was able to deliver useful information from the planet. It was in 2012 that the spacecraft gave significant evidence to prove that frozen water and volatile materials exist within the polar craters of Mercury. The images sent back shows ice at the planet's poles that are about three kilometers thick when spread over an area the size of Washington.
The ice has deposits that suggest presence of organic compounds.
Sean Solomon from Columbia University explained, "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."
The Messenger will have a dive speed of 3.91 kilometers per second (8,750 miles an hour) and will be completely out of propellant after its last orbit on the April 24.
