CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – The only spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury ended its four-year tour with a crash landing Thursday. NASA’s Messenger plunged from orbit as planned and slammed into the sun’s ...

From a Cape Canaveral blockhouse the seven Mercury astronauts watched tensely last week as the countdown neared zero. Atop a towering Redstone rocket rested the one-ton Mercury space capsule of ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: JAXA/ESA The BepiColombo Mercury probe flew close to our solar system's innermost planet ...

Mercury, often considered the “elusive planet,” is notoriously difficult to observe due to its proximity to the Sun. However, ...

The BepiColombo spacecraft has made its sixth and final flyby of the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, capturing some incredible images of the tiny world. The photos offer tantalizing hints about ...

Ground teams cannot restore the spacecraft's full thrust, forcing it to take a different trajectory on its way to the innermost planet. Reading time 3 minutes The European Space Agency (ESA) is having ...

On March 25, the MESSENGER spacecraft completed its 4,000th orbit of Mercury, and the lowest point in its orbit continues to move closer to the planet than ever before. The orbital phase of the ...

BepiColombo, a joint European-Japanese mission, completed its latest flyby of Mercury, sending back a sneak peek of the cratered planet it will begin to orbit in 2026. By Katrina Miller On Thursday, a ...

New photos of Mercury's mysterious north pole reveal a glimpse of the permanently dark, frigid craters that may hold ice dozens of feet thick, even though Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.

Taken with MESSENGER's wide-angle camera on Tuesday, this image is actually a composite of eight pictures, each taken through a different color filter (MESSENGER has 11 filters in total). Debussy, the ...

Despite being relatively nearby, very few space probes have visited the solar system's innermost planet. Any spacecraft aiming to study Mercury must accelerate to incredible speeds, and that can take ...

A joint Japanese-European mission to Mercury just made its sixth flyby of the planet, revealing stunning close-ups of the permanently shadowed craters at Mercury's north pole. When you purchase ...