On 18 March, Nasa spacecraft Messenger will make history by becoming the first to orbit the planet Mercury.
NASA's Messenger spacecraft blazed past the planet Mercury on Monday during the first of a series of rendezvous.
Subsequent missions will analyse the solar wind, three comets and the planet Mercury.
What does traveling at the speed of light really look like, and just how hot is the planet Mercury?
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This was because they saw the black-drop effect in a transit of Mercury, a planet that has no atmosphere.
Researchers at MIT have recently published an experiment that demonstrates that 4 billion years ago, the planet Mercury may have had an ocean of magma on its surface.
The results suggest that 17% of stars host a planet up to 1.25 times the size of the Earth, in close orbits lasting just 85 days or fewer - much like the planet Mercury.
Now, researchers speculate that it is the first known meteorite from our Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and parts of its surface can reach temperatures of 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the new find is a planet just a third the size of that recent record-holder, smaller even than our Solar System's smallest planet, Mercury.
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Eventually, when it is within the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet, it will tack, turn its sail to the sun, and start to accelerate outwards again.
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Photographing Mercury is challenging because of the planet's proximity to the Sun.
He and later astronomers spent decades looking for the missing planet within the orbit of Mercury which, they were convinced, explained what was going on.
Mariner 10, the last spacecraft to visit Mercury, imaged only about 40 percent of the planet, he said.
It was a delta-v opposite to the direction of travel and that slowed Messenger enough so the relatively weak gravity of Mercury could capture the spacecraft and put it into an elliptical orbit around the planet rather than the Sun.
Two further sine waves emerged in 2002, corresponding to one planet that has the mass of Saturn and is also orbiting more closely than Mercury, and another with four times the mass of Jupiter that is located in what would be Jupiter's orbit.
In addition, Messenger will use this lap around Mercury to help put the spacecraft on a trajectory to help it return to orbit around the planet permanently by 2011.
For the show, each planet has a unique video that employs analog and digital processes: charcoal animation for Mercury, volumetric pigments in water for Jupiter, thousands of images from the NASA Cassini mission for Saturn.
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