A new study shows that little, wrinkly Mercury may be shrinking faster than expected. Scientists from the German Aerospace Center reported Thursday that Mercury's shrinkage may be 30% greater than previously believed. They say that represents a loss in diameter of as much as 14 miles, significant for a planet that is barely 3,000 miles across. Mercury has been shrinking ever since its formation 4.5 billion years ago because of internal cooling, which is tightening the surface like a girdle to fit its new slimmer self.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private spacecraft that was supposed to provide a lifeline to NASA’s Swift Observatory managed to get close to t…

Two Mercury-bound spacecraft are in the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage. The linked spacecraft — one European, the other Japanese — separated from their mother ship on Thursday. If all goes well, they'll enter orbit around Mercury in November and split from each other in December to map and study the planet. The BepiColombo mission launched in 2018. It's named for the Italian mathematician who took part in NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s. Only one other spacecraft, NASA's Messenger, has explored our solar system's smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet.

NASA’s newest space telescope has blasted off on a quest to find planets around other stars and explore the hidden universe. SpaceX launched the $4 billion Roman Space Telescope on Sunday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Roman blazed toward an observation point 1 million miles away that’s home to the Webb Space Telescope, one of NASA’s other crown jewels in the sky. Roman will take three months to reach its destination. Once there, it will survey the cosmos like never before. The telescope is named after the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer.