After more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system and six planetary flybys, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft will move into orbit around Mercury on at around 9 p.m. EDT on March 17, 2011. The ...

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 ...

The MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed its first orbit-correction maneuver today to reset its periapsis altitude – the lowest point of MESSENGER’s orbit about Mercury relative to the planet’s ...

NASA’s first-ever Mercury orbiter MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) sent back this image of the hot planet. The shot looks a bit like the moon: barren with lots ...

The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the BepiColombo mission in 2018, and it is set to enter orbit around Mercury in 2025. In the meantime, it will be making several flybys of the planet, ...

NASA has sent the very first spacecraft into an orbit around Mercury, the closest planet on our solar system to the Sun. Now that it is there, NASA’s satellite MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ...

The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the sun's enormous gravity ...

NASA’s MESSENGER probe has become the first spacecraft to enter orbit about Mercury. At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied ...