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Washington, Mar 18(ANI): A NASA spacecraft has successfully entered Mercury’s orbit, where it will spend a year helping scientists better understand the planet closest to the sun.

Messenger’s main thruster fired for about 15 minutes at 8:45pm EDT on Thursday as it slowed and entered Mercury’s orbit about 154 million kilometers from Earth.

Shortly afterwards, NASA engineers received signals confirming the insertion of the probe with no known errors.

This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at the solar system’s innermost planet.

“This mission will continue to revolutionize our understanding of Mercury during the coming year,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was at Messenger mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., as engineers received telemetry data confirming orbit insertion.

“NASA science is rewriting textbooks. Messenger is a great example of how our scientists are innovating to push the envelope of human knowledge,” he added.

Peter Bedini, Messenger project manager of the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said: “Achieving Mercury orbit was by far the biggest milestone since Messenger was launched more than six and a half years ago.”

“This accomplishment is the fruit of a tremendous amount of labor on the part of the navigation, guidance-and-control, and mission operations teams, who shepherded the spacecraft through its 4.9-billion-mile journey,” he added.

For the next several weeks, APL engineers will be focused on ensuring the spacecraft’s systems are all working well in Mercury’s harsh thermal environment.

Starting on March 23, the instruments will be turned on and checked out, and on April 4 the mission’s primary science phase will begin.

“Despite its proximity to Earth, the planet Mercury has for decades been comparatively unexplored,” said Sean Solomon, Messenger principal investigator of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

“For the first time in history, a scientific observatory is in orbit about our solar system’s innermost planet. Mercury’s secrets, and the implications they hold for the formation and evolution of Earth-like planets, are about to be revealed,” he added.

The spacecraft has orbited the sun a dozen times and flown past Venus twice.

It is not the first time a NASA craft has been sent to visit Mercury. Mariner flew past several times to photograph the surface, grabbing images of massive craters, cliffs and small mountain ranges. Messenger, too, snapped photographs on fly-bys it needed to position for orbit. (ANI)