The probe 'Messenger' runs its 'suicide' programd in Mercury

At 21.26 hour spanish peninsular of the Thursday 30, as they had planned the responsible for control of the mission, the spacecraft NASA's MESSENGER crashed on the floor of Mercury, the planet more interior and smaller of the Solar System. After more than four years in orbit there, the auto ship had been run out of fuel and last week received the orders relevant to trajectory of impact against the ground. The impact, which should have produced a crater about 15 or 16 meters in diameter, occurred in the face of Mercury not visible from the Earth, so that the confirmation of the destruction of the Messenger was not taken until 2140 , when not received his signal at the time that would have reappeared on the edge of Mercury of not having been destroyed. It was at that moment when the experts of the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, that development and controlled this mission commissioned by NASA, were done the flight of the Messenger. The impact should occur when the nave, of nearly half a ton in the ground, i was going to a speed of 14,000 kilometers per hour.

"The Messenger will continue to provide scientists a bonanza of new results now that we started the new phase of the mission: the analysis of the exciting data that are already in the files to uncover the mysteries of Mercury," said John Grunsfeld deputy director of the NASA for science.

The probe had sent the same day 30 recent scientific data and images of Mercury, that were received through the antenna of 70 meters in diameter of the station of Robledo de Chavela (Madrid), the Network of NASA's Deep Space, and the station of Goldstone (California), reports the us space agency in a statement. The operators of the mission confirmed that had past, to the 21.04 hours, to receive only the stark beacon signal from the sensor. Since the orbit of Mercury, on 17 March 2011, the Messenger gave 4,105 laps around the small planet capturing scientific information. Only one spacecraft, Mariner 10, NASA, in 1974-75, had been around before to Mercury. The next planned mission BepiColombo will be, from the European Space Agency (ESA), which should be the basis for 2017 to reach its destination in 2024.

Among the many achievements of the Messenger, NASA highlights that it has allowed us to determine the composition of its surface, revealing its geological history, discover its internal magnetic field and verify that there are deposits of water ice in the craters of the polar regions that are permanently in the shade.