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Comment by ramidarigaz | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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