On April 30, 2015, at 3:26 pm (EDT) the MESSENGER spacecraft crashed into the surface of Mercury. Even though the spacecraft is now no more, there are still archives upon archives of data that the tiny spacecraft had sent since 2011 when it first entered into Mercury's orbit, and scientists are anxious to start pouring over it all.
MESSENGER crashed into the surface of the planet traveling at around 8,750 miles per hour, making a new crater on the already scared face of Mercury. The new crater is estimated to be around 52 feet wide. Before final impact, MESSENGER made 4,105 orbits around one of the most curious planets in our solar system.
Jim Raines, a scientist at the University of Michigan who works on the MESSENGER team, had this to say about the crash:
1. Meteors with the same mass as MESSENGER(513 kg) slam into Mercury about every month or two, and typically with 10 times the speed and 100 times the energy. The planet doesn't have a thick atmosphere that would slow down objects headed for the surface.
2. The 1,131-pound spacecraft will hit with the energy of about a ton of TNT, or the force of a car traveling at about 2,000 mph.
3. At almost 9,000 mph, the craft will be traveling three times faster than a speeding bullet and nearly twelve times the speed of sound.
4. On MESSENGER's last orbit, it will pass just 900 to 1,800 feet over the planet's surface. We have buildings that tall on Earth.
5. The crater the craft will leave near Mercury's north pole is predicted to be about 50 feet wide. That's the width of an NBA basketball court.
6. Nearly 55 percent of MESSENGER' weight at launch was fuel - which is about to run out.
MESSENGER stands for "MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. It has had an amazing life, as short as it was. It was launch on August 2, 2004, and crashed yesterday, April 30, 2015.
Information and Statistics here were gathered from EarthSky.org
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