NASA's Messenger probe isn't just homing in on Mercury. Whenever it zooms close to the sun, the probe aims its cameras at the space between our star and its nearest planet, hoping to discover and snap ...

MESSENGER reaches its orbital perihelion today and passes within 0.31 astronomical units (AU) of the Sun (one AU is nearly 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles). The mission’s imaging team is ...

MESSENGER reaches its orbital perihelion today and passes within 0.31 astronomical units (AU) of the Sun (one AU is nearly 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles). The mission’s imaging team is ...

Scientists have long theorized about a population of small, asteroidlike objects roaming around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury. None has been found, but the search for these so-called Vulcanoids ...

frontier of the solar system.

Scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) are eagerly awaiting data from a NASA-sponsored suborbital sounding rocket flight last month that may provide the first evidence of Vulcanoids, the ...

space last week after launching aboard a NASA suborbital Black Brant rocket.

The inner solar system may hold a population of small asteroids just a few miles in diameter. Called Vulcanoids, these objects would lie in a belt between 0.08 and 0.21 astronomical unit from the Sun ...

Two US astronomers have been looking for a suspected belt of asteroids close to the Sun by making observations from the back seat of an F-18 jet. This is the most comprehensive, constraining search ...

Over the past several weeks, you've had a chance to see all the bright planets lined up in the north-western sky, after sunset. Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are easy to spot. Mercury is less ...