For more than five years, a pair of spacecraft have been traveling through the solar system to reach the innermost planet Mercury and observe its extreme conditions. During its complex journey, the BepiColombo mission ran into a problem that’s preventing its thrusters from operating at full power, potentially…
For centuries, astronomers were limited to ground-based observations of the planets, but now we use spacecraft to capture close-up views of our neighboring worlds. Excitingly, our views of solar system planets have been getting progressively better over the decades, as these images attest.
On October 1, 2021, a pair of small spacecraft got their first good look at the closest planet to the Sun, revealing the strange process through which Mercury produces its own auroras.
