Pale blue dot – or not?

Appearances can be deceiving. This thick, cloud-rich atmosphere rains sulphuric acid and below lie not oceans but a baked and barren lava-strewn surface. Welcome to Venus.

Exploring Mercury in a new book

Up until 2008, only one spacecraft had ever visited the planet Mercury, and it didn't linger long. NASA's Mariner 10 mission flew past the tiny world three times in the 1970s, giving humanity a helpful but limited glimpse ...

Five in a row—the planets align in the night sky

For the second time this year, the five brightest planets can be seen at the same time. You can catch them by looking towards the western sky after sunset. The planets will form a line rising up from the horizon.

Mercury studies reveal an intriguing target for BepiColombo

A month before the planned launch of the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, two new studies shed light on when the innermost planet formed and the puzzle of its chemical composition. The findings will be presented ...

New estimates of Mercury's thin, dense crust

Mercury is small, fast and close to the sun, making the rocky world challenging to visit. Only one probe has ever orbited the planet and collected enough data to tell scientists about the chemistry and landscape of Mercury's ...

What is the weather like on Mercury?

With the dawning of the Space Age in the 1950s, human beings were no longer confined to studying the Solar planets and other astronomical bodies with Earth-based instruments alone. Instead crewed missions have gone into orbit ...

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