NASA confirmed the MESSENGER spacecraft will meet its end in a matter of weeks.

In an announcement Thursday, mission managers said MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) will deplete its fuel and head downward toward the planet's surface.

"Following this last maneuver, we will finally declare the spacecraft out of propellant, as this maneuver will deplete nearly all of our remaining helium gas," Daniel O'Shaughnessy, mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said in the announcement. "At that point, the spacecraft will no longer be capable of fighting the downward push of the sun's gravity."

Mission mangers registered the maneuver Tuesday and it will occur Friday, April 24 with impact on Mercury's surface expected by April 30. Pushed down by the sun's gravitational force, NASA said MESSENGER will strike the surface of Mercury on the side looking away from Earth at a velocity of nearly 9,000 miles per hour.

"For the first time in history we now have real knowledge about the planet Mercury that shows it to be a fascinating world as part of our diverse solar system," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate for NASA, said in the release. "While spacecraft operations will end, we are celebrating MESSENGER as more than a successful mission. It's the beginning of a longer journey to analyze the data that reveals all the scientific mysteries of Mercury."

MESSENGER came from the University of Colorado (CU) - Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The $8.7 million spacecraft launched in 2004 and entered Mercury's orbit in 2011.

"The spacecraft is finally running out of fuel, and at this point it's just sort of skimming the planet's surface," CU - Boulder's William McClintock said in a press release. "A lot of people didn't give this spacecraft much of a chance of even getting to Mercury, let alone going into orbit and then gathering data for four years instead of the original scheduled one-year mission.

"In the end, most of what we considered to be gospel about Mercury turned out to be a little different than we thought."