Most people learned in school that Mercury is just a small, scorched planet close to the Sun. But NASA’s MESSENGER mission ...

The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has awarded the 2012 Laurels for Team Achievement Award to the MESSENGER team. The award was presented September 30 at the opening ceremony of the 63rd ...

It’s been five years since MESSENGER was launched atop a Delta II rocket on August 3, 2004, and they have been busy years. It has been a long journey, says MESSENGER Mission Operations Manager Andy ...

Diamonds aren't the traditional 20th anniversary gift, but we're not going to complain, since these came from a spacecraft that crashed into the surface of Mercury back in 2015. NASA's MESSENGER ...

The MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed a fifth orbit-correction maneuver today to lower MESSENGER’s periapsis altitude from 442 to 200 kilometers and decrease the orbital period from 12 hours ...

The origin of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is mysterious in many ways. It has a metallic core, like Earth, but its core makes up a much larger fraction of its volume—85% compared to 15% for ...

On April 30, 2015, NASA's MESSENGER mission came to an end when the spacecraft intentionally crashed into the surface of Mercury. MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury and the second ...

Global maps of Mercury. Half the globe is shown in black & white, the other in color. Each map is composed of thousands of images. Click this and any of the other photos for hi-res versions. Credit: ...

In just a few hours, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft will smack into the surface of Mercury, thus ending its 11 year mission. It sounds like a disaster, but this is always the way it was supposed to go ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U. S. Geological Survey have created a critical tool for planning the first orbital observations of the planet Mercury ...