NASA's MESSENGER probe has been gathering and sharing information about Mercury for almost three years and it is about to crash into Mercury, according to The Space Reporter.
Don't worry - it's supposed to do that.
MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. The spacecraft was launched in 2004 and was expected to take 2,500 photos of Mercury's surface. MESSENGER has exceeded expectations with over 250,000 photos taken in the last three years while it circled Mercury. Before MESSENGER, a probe the Mariner 10 was sent to capture images of the planet in the 1970s. M10 mapped 45 percent of Mercury's surface. MESSENGER has covered the entire planet's surface.
MESSENGER is expected to run out of fuel in March 2015. Gravity will pull the probe into the planet for a final act: a crater-causing crash landing. In celebration, NASA and MESSENGER scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are holding a naming contest for five of the currently unnamed craters on Mercury.
"Impact craters are named in honor of people who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to the Arts and Humanities (visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, architects, musicians, composers and so on)," according to the competition's website. "The person must have been recognized as an art-historically significant figure for more than 50 years and must have been dead for at least three years. We are particularly interested in submissions that honor people from nations and cultural groups that are under-represented amongst the currently-named craters."
The craters up for naming range from 24 kilometers in diameter to 105 kilometers in diameter. The five unnamed craters were discovered by MESSENGER. The naming ceremony will coincide with MESSENGER's demise.
