Thirty-three years ago, the Mariner 10 spacecraft made its third and final flyby of Mercury. Most of what we know about the innermost planet came from those three tours. The problem: Due to a ...

And so close to the sun, a spacecraft has to withstand extreme heat and radiation. Only two missions have reached Mercury before BepiColombo: NASA’s Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s and MESSENGER ...

The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later ...