MIAMI: A NASA probe that has circled Mercury for the past four years will make a dramatic death plunge into the planet’s surface in late April when it runs out of fuel.
The MESSENGER spacecraft — which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging — will end its run, as planned, on or around April 30, the US space agency said.
Its mission was initially only supposed to last one year, but since it was operating well and returning interesting data and discoveries, scientists extended its life as long as they could.
Messenger’s key finding, in 2012, was a thick coat of ice in Mercury’s polar regions, providing “compelling support for the hypothesis that Mercury harbors abundant frozen water and other volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters,” NASA said.
“For the first time, scientists began seeing clearly a chapter in the story of how the inner planets, including Earth, acquired water and some of the chemical building blocks for life,” the agency said in a statement.
Scientists believe that the closest planet to the Sun likely got its water when comets and volatile-rich asteroids made impact, sometime in history.
Messenger was launched in 2004 and traveled for more than six years before it finally began orbiting Mercury on March 18, 2011.
