NASA completed their MESSENGER Mission, in which the spacecraft crashed into the planet Mercury after a four-year exploration.
In a press release, NASA revealed the impact occurred today at a speed of 8,750 miles per hour. The name of the spacecraft was an acronym for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging. Mission controllers watching the spacecraft had anticipated it would crash and it did at 3:26 pm Eastern.
The associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, said, “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.”
The crash was not seen by ground-based telescopes on Earth, but mission controllers knew the crash occurred when they did not get a signal from the Deep Space Network system, located in Goldstone, CA.
The mission began in 2004 when it was launched and the spacecraft began its orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011. It completed the work that the scientific objectives had called for by 2012, but the exploration was extended so that more information could be gleaned from the planet closest to the sun.
FoxNews.com reported that the Twitter account for MESSENGER had delivered a final message in preparing for the impact. The spacecraft allowed more than 270,000 images of Mercury to be brought to Earth.
Image via Twitter from MESSENGER.