ESA's Solar Orbiter captured views of the planet Mercury passing in front of the Sun. Multiple instruments aboard the ...

To get somewhere in outer space, you can’t exactly drive in a straight line. Orbits are tricky things, and sending a probe to ...

BepiColombo passed a mere 295 kilometers above Mercury's surface at 6:59 ... BepiColombo will only be the second spacecraft to do it, following NASA's Messenger mission in 2011.

After the space agency canceled its VIPER rover, an empty space was available on a private spacecraft that will still head to ...

And so close to the sun, a spacecraft has to withstand extreme heat and radiation. Only two missions have reached Mercury before BepiColombo: NASA’s Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s and MESSENGER ...

The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later ...

📅 Today in History: In 1961, NASA launched the Mercury-Redstone 2 spacecraft with a 3-year-old chimpanzee named Ham secured in a seat for the flight, which lasted over 16 minutes and traveled at a ...