NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft crash-landed onto Mercury's surface as planned Thursday, ending its mission.
According to FoxNews.com, the probe orbiting the solar system's innermost planet finally ran out of fuel and hit Mercury's surface at approximately 3:26 p.m. ET. The impact reportedly gave Mercury a new crater, this one about 50 feet wide.
"Going out with a bang as it impacts the surface of Mercury, we are celebrating MESSENGER as more than a successful mission," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a press release. "The MESSENGER mission will continue to provide scientists with a bonanza of new results as we begin the next phase of this mission--analyzing the exciting data already in the archives, and unraveling the mysteries of Mercury."
NASA was able to confirm MESSENGER's end by 3:40 p.m. ET. The satellite crashed down when it was on the side of Mercury facing away from Earth, so mission managers needed to wait until MESSENGER did not emerge from another orbit.
MESSENGER launched in Aug. 2003 and started orbiting Mercury in March, 2011, going well beyond its intended mission. Though the spacecraft wrapped up its operations within a year, MESSENGER kept going until mission managers could see its fuel depleting.
"We monitored MESSENGER's beacon signal for about 20 additional minutes," Andy Calloway, a mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in the release. "It was strange to think during that time MESSENGER had already impacted, but we could not confirm it immediately due to the vast distance across space between Mercury and Earth."
