Turns out, it's as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions ...

Mercury has long been cast as the solar system’s burnt-out rock, a relic too small and too close to the Sun to hold many surprises. That caricature is now collapsing. New analysis of NASA’s MESSENGER ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The BepiColombo spacecraft snapped a photo of the newly named Vivaldi crater as it sped by Mercury on Sept. 4, 2024. A robotic ...

Twenty years ago, the MESSENGER mission revolutionized our understanding of Mercury. We sat down with project head and former Carnegie Science director Sean Solomon to talk about how the mission came ...

Some key stages remain before BepiColombo's instruments sit in Mercury's orbit.

NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury carrying an $8.7 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument is slated to run out of fuel and crash into the planet in the coming days after a wildly ...

The BepiColombo spacecraft snaps rare close-up images of Mercury during a planned gravity-assist flyby in 2023. Credit: ESA / JAXA A complex mission to Mercury that began its epic space voyage six ...

The European and Japanese mission BepiColombo has made its first flyby of Mercury, capturing images of the planet it will eventually be exploring in more depth. In order to get close to the planet, ...

As an end-member of terrestrial planet formation, Mercury holds unique clues about the original distribution of elements in the earliest stages of solar system development and how planets and ...

The European and Japanese team behind the BepiColombo mission to Mercury has shared the first image of the spacecraft’s recent flyby of the distant planet. The black-and-white image shows the planet ...