The Messenger spacecraft will soon end a 10-year mission orbiting the planet Mercury. The spacecraft will crash into the planet on April 30.

Presently, the space vehicle is skimming above the surface of the planet. The spacecraft that was sent to the space on August 3, 2004, will run out of fuel and will crash into innermost world of the solar system. MESSENGER was the second to Mercury after Mariner 10 mission of 1974 and 1975.

"A lot of people didn't give this spacecraft much of a chance of even getting to Mercury, let alone going into orbit and then gathering data for four years instead of the original scheduled one-year mission", said William McClintock of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at Colorado University-Boulder.

Daniel O'Shaughnessy, a mission systems engineer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said that by following this last maneuver, they are going to lastly declare MESSENGER out of propellant because this maneuver is going deplete almost all of our remaining helium gas. Final work of MESSENGER is going to leave an indelible mark on Mercury when the spacecraft heads down to an inevitable surface impact.

There is a possibility that the vehicle might be dragged to a stop on the surface of Mercury or it could strike a scrap that has mountain such as features that may have been produced by cooling of the planet at the time of the formation of the solar system.

According to researchers, the mission is controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel. It is expected that the MESSENGER spacecraft will impact the planet at more than 8,750 mph.