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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

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% ...

Messenger's first flyby, in January, gave scientists images of about 20 percent of the planet that had been previously unseen by spacecraft, providing answers that lingered from the Mariner 10 mission ...

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 ...

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 ...