[url]http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/04/30/mercury-messenger-satellite-spacecraft/26616163/[/url]
[quote=USA TODAY]Its fuel tanks empty and its options gone, NASA's Messenger spacecraft smashed into planet Mercury on Thursday afternoon after valiantly fighting off the inevitable.
Engineers calculated that the spacecraft, traveling a scorching 8,700 mph, bombed into the planet's heavily pockmarked surface at 3:26 p.m. ET Thursday. It was not a gentle goodbye: The impact was expected to pulverize the car-sized spaceship and gouge out a 50-foot crater -- big enough to accommodate a school bus -- near Mercury's north pole.
Engineers calculated that the spacecraft belly-flopped onto the cratered terrain on the far side of Mercury, when the ship was out of contact with Earth.[/quote]
The article doesn't really go into detail, so I'll ask here.
What were some important/interesting things we learned from Messenger?
Theres no stable orbit when you are that close to the sun, that they kept it up another month by using the on board helium supply as reaction mass was well worth it. I do wonder if someday someone will go there for something and find some fragment of memory or solar panel and bring it back
[editline]30th April 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=richard9311;47636146]The article doesn't really go into detail, so I'll ask here.
What were some important/interesting things we learned from Messenger?[/QUOTE]
60% of Mercurys surface was unmapped before this probe and pretty much everything we know of the surface since the only other time a probe visited was mariner and it only flew by, and its probably going to be the only mercury probe for a long time simply because there's not much else to learn that warrants another probe
[QUOTE=richard9311;47636146]The article doesn't really go into detail, so I'll ask here.
What were some important/interesting things we learned from Messenger?[/QUOTE]
First Mercurian satellite IIRC.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;47636119]the spacecraft belly-flopped[/QUOTE]
what a beautiful way to go
in all seriousness, i reckon we should find a way to return all crashed spacecrafts back to earth so we could re-use the materials
With a crater that large and its position of impact fairly-well calculated, a future mission to Mercury should be able to identify the crash site.
I think it's actually kinda cool were starting to create stuff that humans will find hundreds of years from now and put in a museum
how long until they retaliate?
[QUOTE=Sega Saturn;47636184]With a crater that large and its position of impact fairly-well calculated, a future mission to Mercury should be able to identify the crash site.[/QUOTE]
And maybe even put a rover on it, assuming it's a high enough latitude that it can remain on the night side of the planet for a while.
[QUOTE=Bradyns;47636157]First Mercurian satellite IIRC.[/QUOTE]
Mariner 10 was our first Mercury probe and made several passes before running out of fuel and going dead, but it's likely still out there, orbiting the sun and passing by Mercury every few months. MESSENGER was the second and the first to orbit the planet.
[QUOTE=richard9311;47636146]The article doesn't really go into detail, so I'll ask here.
What were some important/interesting things we learned from Messenger?[/QUOTE]
Wikipedia sez,
[QUOTE]The mission was designed to clear up six key issues: Mercury's high density, its geological history, the nature of its magnetic field, the structure of its core, whether it has ice at its poles, and where its tenuous atmosphere comes from. To this end, the probe carried imaging devices that gathered much higher resolution images of much more of the planet than Mariner 10, assorted spectrometers to determine abundances of elements in the crust, and magnetometers and devices to measure velocities of charged particles. Detailed measurements of tiny changes in the probe's velocity as it orbits will be used to infer details of the planet's interior structure.[/QUOTE]
It also did a whole bunch of mapping that Mariner 10 didn't manage to do, and at better quality.
[QUOTE=TheDrunkenOne;47636168]what a beautiful way to go
in all seriousness, i reckon we should find a way to return all crashed spacecrafts back to earth so we could re-use the materials[/QUOTE]
There would be no point. You would use so much more in fuel and materials to go out there and bring back satellites. It's why no ones really bothered to clean up the mess of debris in our own Earth orbit, way too expensive for too little returns.
Well it had to happen sooner or later.
Here's the last thing Messenger ever saw:
[img]http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/last_image.jpg[/img]
I wonder if the crater is visible through a telescope. It would be cool to look at something like that and say "Yeah, humanity did that".
[QUOTE=Wealth + Taste;47636283]I wonder if the crater is visible through a telescope. It would be cool to look at something like that and say "Yeah, humanity did that".[/QUOTE]
We need special satellites to resolve images of 50-foot objects on Earth from LEO, we'd need a pretty good probe orbiting close to Mercury in order to even see the impact site, let alone identify it.
[QUOTE=TheDrunkenOne;47636168]what a beautiful way to go
in all seriousness, i reckon we should find a way to return all crashed spacecrafts back to earth so we could re-use the materials[/QUOTE]
It would cost thousands of times more than recycling the materials would return...
This is indeed sad however there is one spacecraft currently at ceres that will actually orbit indefinitely providing something doesnt come and throw it off course massively.
R.I.P MSN Messenger I'll never forget spending every night in the summer of '03 chatting up my cutie pie <3
I know this is real, but am I the only one that thinks those pictures looks like they are straight from an animated movie.
[QUOTE=TheDrunkenOne;47636168]in all seriousness, i reckon we should find a way to return all crashed spacecrafts back to earth so we could re-use the materials[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE].. Traveling a scorching 8,700 mph, bombed into the planet's heavily pockmarked surface[/QUOTE]
What spacecraft?
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
