mercury

Sky watchers have something extra special to look forward to later in June, as all five of the planets that we can see with the naked eye – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – are going to line up in the sky.  Not only that, but they're going to appear in order of their distance from the Sun, from left to right as you scan the horizon: that means starting with Mercury (an average of 58 million kilometers or 36 million miles from the Sun) and ending with Saturn (an average of 1.4 billion kilometers or 886 million…

Photos of boulders on Mercury were taken by the American automatic interplanetary space probe MESSENGER. Credit: NASAScientists received new information about the conditions on the planet closest to the Sun.An international group of planetary scientists from the United States, Russia, and Finland for the first time analyzed the abundance of boulders on Mercury and the factors that determine it. Details of the research and conclusions were published in the journal Icarus, which is dedicated to the study of the solar system…

A solar probe launched by the European Space Agency in 2020 made its first close approach to the Sun and captured the chaotic encounter in dazzling detail. The ESA's Solar Orbiter, on March 26, reached inside the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun. Encounters like this are known as a perihelion, when a planet is closest to the life-giving Sun. However, one of the biggest challenges for a spacecraft reaching its perihelion is to withstand the incredible heat. When the Solar Orbiter reached this point, it faced…