After orbiting Mercury for more than three years collecting data and photos to send back to Earth, NASA's Messenger spacecraft ran out of fuel Thursday and smashed into Mercury in a fiery — yet planned — crash.
Though Messenger was always set to meet its end in this way, it existed much longer than expected — scientists had only planned for the craft to last for a year in orbit. In recent weeks, the spacecraft found that Mercury has patches of ice in some of its craters, and its gradual drift towards Mercury's surface meant that scientists could actually get better photos of the planet.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Is international law falling apart?Today's Big Question Conflict in Gaza is testing the strength of the two intergovernmental courts in The Hague
-
The Week Junior newsletterSpark new conversations with your child - every week
-
'Florida's abortion law leads to "chaos"'Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeepingSpeed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
-
An amphibian that produces milk?speed read Caecilians, worm-like amphibians that live underground, produce a milk-like substance for their hatchlings
-
Jupiter's Europa has less oxygen than hopedspeed read Scientists say this makes it less likely that Jupiter's moon harbors life
-
Why February 29 is a leap daySpeed Read It all started with Julius Caesar
-
US spacecraft nearing first private lunar landingSpeed Read If touchdown is successful, it will be the first U.S. mission to the moon since 1972
-
Scientists create 'meaty' rice for eco-friendly proteinSpeed Read Korean scientists have invented a new hybrid food, consisting of beef muscle and fat cells grown inside grains of rice
-
New images reveal Neptune and Uranus in different colours than originally thoughtSpeed Read Voyager 2 images from the 1980s led to 'modern misconception'
