Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists.  But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon.  The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008.  Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...