#sapce

Messenger was slingshot from inner planet to inner planet. Going from Earth to Venus, then back to Venus again, before completing three flybys of Mercury, only catching glimpses of its final destination. Until, finally, after 6 years, 7 months and 16 days, it slowed down enough thanks to those planetary flybys to safely enter orbit.

It travelled 7,9 billion km to get to Mercury, a planet that, at its closest, is only 77 million km away from Earth (you can't take a direct route because the sun's gravity will speed up the spacecraft too much).

Messenger then spent the next four years around that planet, from 2011 to 2015. And then, after those 4 years, after all the propellant was used up and it could no longer correct its orbit, it crashed down to the planet’s thin rocky surface. The one it had spent all those years observing.

All that time and distance travelled, only to spend 4 years around Mercury. 1505 days.

And it was all worth it.

Thanks to Messenger, we know so much about Mercury, the tiny crater-riddled planet at the heart of our solar system.

We know that in its polar regions, there is ice located in shadowy craters that the sunlight can never touch. We learned that, due to its cooling core, Mercury has contracted about 7 km in radius. We’ve learnt about its composition, its magnetic field, its past volcanic activity, and so much more.

Messenger went through 2 mission extensions, traveled about 14 billion km in total, took over 290,000 images, and mapped the whole of the planet for the first time.

We have thousands of detailed images of a planet so hard to get to, humanity is unlikely to see with its own eyes in my lifetime. And those images are all so beautiful.

(all images are credited to: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

woke up with 20 minutes to spare to post this anyways this is my favorite oiece out of all these i did :D go read the final chapter of The Void Yawns Softly by @lexiepiper 

After a month outage Hubble is back to business...