Messenger Orbiter Comes to a Crashing End on Thursday | Hacker News Reader

Messenger Orbiter Comes to a Crashing End on Thursday

airspacemag.com

76 pointsdnetesn14 comments

A few days ago I was talking to my daughter about robots and our conversation turned to planetary probes. I told her about New Horizons (the pluto probe) and thought "I should look and find out all the active missions." I was surprised to find that MESSENGER was still going, but was going to end soon. I explained to her about how it found ice in the craters of Mercury and she was amazed.

Anyway, just a small anecdote by which I'll remember MESSENGER. RIP my robot friend!

I was actually fortunate enough to work on the MESSENGER mission for a while (in a small way). Sad to see it go, but it had a really good run.

This article has a nice overview of the things it accomplished.

http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2015/04/16/after-succe...

Thanks for sharing this link!

Congrats, it must feel awesome to be a part something like this and sad to see come to an end.

May I ask what parts of the project were you working on at the time?

Also, I read about MESSENGER's mission here:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Targe...

Did it accomplish all the missions?

The lab I work for (http://lasp.colorado.edu/) has an instrument on board (MASCS). I worked on a 3D visualization tool for the data it produced.

As far as I know, it accomplished all its goals (and more!). Many of the findings, especially the ice in the polar craters, were completely unexpected, and that's the most exciting part of doing science!

That is pretty rad! Kudos, thanks for info.

In all fairness, that's the most exciting thing for experimentalists. For theoreticians, it's a variation on the same thing, coming up with a theory that explains phenomena beyond what they were developing it for, e.g. Einstein's single greatest personal experience was when he discovered his general relativity explained an anomaly of Mercury's orbit.

One really cool thing about MESSENGER is that its mission was extended by using its solar panels as a sail, and save some fuel. It's actually the first solar-sail use to date.

> This close to the sun, the intense solar gravity has to be taken into account ... the sun is actually pulling the spacecraft toward the planet.

> Sunlight also exerts physical force at this close range; solar radiation pressure nudges the spacecraft enough to change its speed by one or two centimeters per second, every day

That's really neat. Love learning about the crazy stuff that happens out there.

Godspeed MESSENGER. You served us well.

So many interesting, and at the time unorthodox orbital maneuvers were utilized by this spacecraft.

I may send a probe off to Moho in KSP tonight in honor of both MESSENGER and of KSP officially releasing. I'll try to make the flight path as convoluted as possible and include only the bare minimum thrust needed to get into orbit. It will be much less difficult to stay in orbit of course since KSP's physics model doesn't take into account Kerbol's gravity near Moho.

"Its trajectory will intersect the planet’s surface..." I thought this was a particularly nice way to say "crash".

It has been a great piece of hardware and source of information. Too bad these missions have such finite time limits.

Maintaining those missions from so far away, with tools that are many years old by the time they are re-configured, is an engineering feat that always amazes me when I read about it.

Oh, this isn't about Facebook Messenger... :(

I actually thought about Facebook Messenger first as well. Well done Facebook branding team!

I thought about MSN Messenger. I'm getting old I guess ...

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