A new crater on Mercury, thanks to you and me, this week on planetary radio. That was the countdown to the climactic.

That was the one.

That was the one.

That was the countdown to the climactic end of the messenger mission as it was heard in the mission

operation center at the Applied Physics Laboratory.

Standing there with his team was principal investigator Sean Solomon.

Sean will join us to recap the brilliantly successful voyage of messenger

and to look forward toward the next steps in the exploration of our solar system's

innermost planet. Bill Nye has the week off, but senior editor Emily Lochuala

is here for our regular conversation, and Bruce Bats will make his usual visit bringing planets

comets and a prize for the winner of this week's space trivia contest.

Emily with the messenger missions Sean Solomon just moments away.

I wanted to get your reaction and also the some of the reactions that you

summarized in a blog post right after the impact of the messenger spacecraft.

Well it's always really hard to say goodbye to a spacecraft,

especially one that's done so well as messenger has.

They really got every last possible bit of science

they could out of this tiny little mission. They mapped all of Mercury. They did much more

than they promised they could do. It's been absolutely fantastic. I have no further wishes for

Messenger, but I was still very sad to see it go. I loved seeing the folks that you found

on Twitter who found quotations from Shakespeare that did seem to be quite

appropriate. Yeah it sprang off the fact that sites on Mercury are named for people who have contributed to the arts, and it just so happens that the site where Messenger was just about to crash was near a crater named for Shakespeare.

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