NASA MESSENGER mission: a tool to study Mercury beyond its operative life

The morphology of impact craters depends on the target properties, including changes in density, strength, water content, porosity, and composition, allowing in turn to study the interior of planetary bodies. Along with naturally formed impact structures, there are a number of artificial craters, produced by a metallic module while the main spacecraft observes the process and the impact products . One benefit of this method is that the initial impact energy is well known, and therefore any variation with respect to the expected shape depends on the target properties only. Spacecrafts crushing on planetary surfaces at the end of their operative life can also provide valuable information on the target material properties and near-surface stratigraphy, when they are imaged by subsequent space missions. In this work, we analyze the formation of the crater formed by the NASA MESSENGER spacecraft, which impacted on the Hermean surface on April 2015. We investigate the artificial crater via numerical modelling by testing several targets scenarios, and discussing the outcomes in view of a possible future observations.