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 ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. From July 17 to Aug. 10, Mercury will appear to move ...

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 ...

The Moon reaches perigee at 1:59 P.M. EDT. Perigee is the point in the Moon’s orbit when it is closest to Earth; this afternoon, our satellite will sit 229,456 miles (369,274 km) away. Mercury is just ...

Get ready, Mercury will enter its first retrograde period this year from Feb. 26 through March 20. As the planet of communication appears to move backward in the sky, expect delays or glitches in ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- MESSENGER scientists will highlight the latest results on Mercury from MESSENGER observations obtained during the first six months (the first Mercury solar day) in orbit. These ...

The long-anticipated BepiColombo mission is entering its decisive phase. Launched in 2018, this joint endeavor between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is ...

Right: Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter Mio of the BepiColombo mission; Left: Earth’s GEOTAIL satellite. The illustration highlights comparative studies of planetary magnetospheres. An international ...

A collision with an asteroid might have set the planet Mercury whirling oddly in its orbit, a new study suggests. When one body orbits another — say, a moon around a planet or a planet around a star — ...

August is full of celestial events, and this week marks a milestone for the 4.503 billion-year-old planet known as Mercury. Being such a small planet that lies close to the sun, Mercury can be ...