Mercury

ESA has released "sonifications" of the telemetry sent back by the BepiColombo Mercury probe during its April 20, 2020 flyby of Earth. The five audio recordings were captured by two instruments installed on one of the two linked orbiters.

The BepiColombo deep-space probe has successfully made its flyby of Earth on its journey to explore the planet Mercury. On April 10, the joint ESA/JAXA mission passed within 12,700 km of the Earth's surface as it carried out a slingshot maneuver.

This week Earth will be visited by a spacecraft that has traveled 1.4 billion km to get here. But no, it’s not aliens – it’s BepiColombo, just slingshotting around our planet for a gravitational speed boost on its roundabout journey to Mercury.

Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is home to a surprising amount of ice. Now, researchers at Georgia Tech have put forward an explanation for how at least some of it got there – and it turns out, the heat plays an important role.

Earth’s poles are famously icy places, but they’re far from alone in that regard. The poles of other planets and moons are often the best places to look for ice, and now a new analysis of NASA data has found evidence of much more water ice on the Moon and Mercury than previously thought.

Saturn may sport the most famous rings in the solar system, but it’s far from the only thing with some bling. Now, two new studies have found evidence of new rings in the inner solar system – a dusty one in the orbit of Mercury and a new set of asteroids following Venus’ path around the Sun.

ESA's BepiColombo spacecraft has fired up all four of its ion thrusters as it begins the first of 22 burn arcs. The engines will fire for two months as they propel the unmanned probe on the start of its 9-billion-km (5.6-billion-mi) journey to explore the planet Mercury.

Los Angeles-based Icon does the "electrified classic" a little differently, preserving the aged look and patina of a 1949 Mercury while adding a 200-mile (322-km), 400-hp (298-kW) dual-motor electric powertrain.​ It's a sleeper for the electric age.

​​Scientists on the ESA’s first mission to Mercury have confirmed the outgoing BepiColombo spacecraft’s imaging instruments are in working order, with the probe snapping its first selfies and successfully returning them to Earth.​

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is on its way to Mercury, but instead of coasting to the smallest planet in the Solar System, it will be helped along by four state-of-the-art ion thrusters developed by an industrial consortium led by British company QinetiQ.

ESA's first mission to the planet Mercury lifted off today from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. At 10:45 pm GFT (October 20, 01:45 GMT), the BepiColombo spacecraft rose on a tail of fire into the night atop an Ariane 5 booster on the start of a voyage that will take seven years.

An official launch date has been set for the long-planned BepiColombo​ mission to Mercury. The joint ESA/JAXA deep space probe will lift off atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the ESA Spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana on October 18, 2018.