A European-Japanese spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole as part of only the second human survey of our solar system's innermost planet.

Caption This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a ...

Indeed, Mercury was far from impossible to glimpse during elongations as favorable as the upcoming one. Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

As soon as the U.S. decided to go ahead with Project Mercury, the first missile-borne man-in-space capsule (TIME, Jan. 26), the Pentagon’s IBM machines began sorting through Air Force and Navy ...