MESSENGER mission ends with crash landing on Mercury
![illustration of Messenger over Mercury](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ticker_MESSENGER_free.jpg?fit=860%2C460&ssl=1)
The MESSENGER spacecraft, illustrated here with actual images of Mercury’s cratered landscape captured by the probe in an early flyby of the planet in 2008, ended its four-year mission April 30.
NASA, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington