Mercury Stories
Mercury’s Strange Hollows
Enigmatic depressions on the surface have puzzled scientists since the 1970s For decades, scientists have been puzzling over strange hollows on Mercury’s surface, thousands of peculiar depressions at a variety of longitudes and latitudes, ranging in size from 60 feet…
10 ‘Super Bowls’ in Our Solar System
Here are 10 impressively super, bowl-shaped venues adorning worlds in our solar system, including a couple where we've actually made…touchdowns!
January 2022: The Next Full Moon is the Wolf Moon, or Ice Moon
The Next Full Moon is the Wolf Moon, Ice Moon, the Moon after Yule, and the Old Moon.
August 2021: The Next Full Moon is a Blue Moon, the Sturgeon or Green Corn Moon
The Next Full Moon is a Blue Moon, and is also known as the Hungry Ghost Moon.
10+ Things: Tour of Storms Across the Solar System
Our solar system is a stormy place. Join us on a tour of storms.
A Closer Look at Mercury’s Spin and Gravity Reveals the Planet’s Inner Solid Core
NASA Scientists found evidence that Mercury’s inner core is indeed solid and that it is very nearly the same size as Earth’s inner core.
45 Years Ago: Mariner 10 First to Explore Mercury
A unique opportunity presented itself in 1973 to send a spacecraft to visit both Venus and Mercury in a single mission. Using gravity assist, a technique theorized for decades but never used before, under favorable conditions a spacecraft sent to…
What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in the Solar System
Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace…
NASA Team Studies Middle-aged Sun by Tracking Motion of Mercury
Like the waistband of a couch potato in midlife, the orbits of planets in our solar system are expanding. It happens because the Sun’s gravitational grip gradually weakens as our star ages and loses mass. Now, a team of NASA…
Small Collisions Make Big Impact on Mercury’s Thin Atmosphere
Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning micro-meteor showers. Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space…