Messenger’s Last Legs

The MESSENGER mission, short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging sent up the probe in August 2004. In March 2011 it became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The probe has done a lot in its years around the Solar System’s first planet including: constructing the best-ever maps of Mercury and discovering carbon-containing organic material and water ice inside the shadowed craters near the world’s north pole. Unfortunately, the probe is almost out of fuel and will inevitably crash into Mercury, but scientists aren’t quite done with it. They are going to go through with a strategy including five maneuvers in five weeks to keep the spacecraft between 3 and 24 miles above the planets surface. In doing so, they hope to shed more light on the shadowed craters at high northern latitudes, as well as look for crustal magnetic anomalies which may extend the known baseline for Mercury’s internal magnetic field by as much as eight orders of magnitude. The little spacecraft has already made two maneuvers, one on March 18th and one on April 2nd and is expected to stay in orbit until April 30.

Messenger’s Accomplishments and Survival