After a mission of 11 years, the Messenger probe is expected to complete its mission by crashing on Mercury Thursday, April 30.
The NASA spacecraft Messenger, which collected a myriad of data in orbit around the planet Mercury since March 17, 2011, will end his race on the nearest planet to the Sun, Mercury, Thursday, April 30.
During his mission, the probe has provided important data to scientists. For example, they discovered that Mercury’s surface was covered with a layer of carbon from meteorites that strike its surface for billions of years. This data could be crucial to have new information about the origin of life on Earth.
MESSENGER, whose name means Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, was launched in space in August 2004 and has covered eight billion kilometers when it will form a large crater 16 meters in diameter. When that happens, it will hit Mercury’s surface at over 14,000 km / h.
NASA has planned to replace the Messenger probe BepiColombo, the European Space Agency, which will start in 2017 to reach Mercury in 2024.
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