Six things you didn't know about MESSENGER's Mercury crash
Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - 05:30
in Astronomy & Space
The MESSENGER spacecraft left Earth in 2004 carrying among its instruments a sensor built at Michigan Engineering's Space Physics Research Lab. Over the years, some 75 U-M researchers, including faculty members, engineers and students, were involved in either making the Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer, also known as FIPS, or analyzing the data it sent back. MESSENGER, which flew by Venus and Mercury before entering orbit around the closest planet to the sun, will end its mission April 30, 2015, by crashing into Mercury, as NASA intended.