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Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com NASA's MESSENGER probe has sent back an image from Mercury that is either an alien's sense of humor, or a few asteroid's depiction of Mickey Mouse on the sun-baked planet. A Mickey Mouse face can now be seen on Mercury's surface thanks to NASA's MESSENGER probe, which became the first spacecraft to orbit the planet back in March 2011. The shape is made up of three overlapping craters on Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of the crater known as...

NASA released the first batch of hundreds of photos taken by MESSENGER during its orbit of Mercury on Wednesday. The images show numerous battle scars on the planet, which scientists said are from space rocks regularly pelting Mercury at high speeds. MESSENGER's images have revealed a planet full of craters from pieces of asteroids and comets. Mission chief scientists Sean Solomon said scientists are surprised to see more secondary craters than expected. Scientists said that those craters are...

Earth's next-door neighbor, the Moon, has been found by astronomers to be shrinking, but only by a miniscule amount.Astronomers reported Thursday in the US journal Science that they had discovered previous undetected cracks in the moon's crust that formed as the interior cooled and shrunk over the last billion or so years. The finding indicates that the lunar satellite has definitely gotten smaller, though not enough that it would be noticed by just gazing at it.Scientists have identified 14...

GREENBELT, Md., Aug. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Newly discovered cliffs in the lunar crust indicate the moon shrank globally in the geologically recent past and might still be shrinking today, according to a team analyzing new images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. The results provide important clues to the moon's recent geologic and tectonic evolution. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) (Logo:...

Scientists have argued about the origins of Mercury's smooth plains and the source of its magnetic field for more than 30 years. Now, analyses of data from the January 2008 flyby of the planet by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft have shown that volcanoes were involved in plains formation and suggest that its magnetic field is actively produced in the planet's core. Scientists additionally took their first look at the chemical...