Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into NASA's moon and Mars missions, chatting up astronauts and history-making discoverers, and jetting above the clouds . Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor, Best in Show, and national recognition for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won National Headliner Awards, including first place for her Sex in Space series.

It seems like it should be pretty easy to get to Mercury. The little rocky planet is so much closer to Earth than distant destinations like Jupiter, where we've successfully sent multiple spacecraft. Plus, it doesn't have a crushing atmosphere like our nearest neighbor Venus. But, in fact, it's actually really difficult to reach the innermost planet of our solar system--which makes it that much more impressive that the ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission has almost reached Mercury, recently completing its final flyby of the planet before entering orbit next year. Reaching Mercury is such a challenge because "the gravitational pull of the Sun is very strong near Mercury, which makes it difficult for spacecraft to slow down enough to enter orbit around the planet," explains Lina Hadid, staff scientist at CNRS in France and principal investigator of one of BepiColombo's instruments.

The BepiColombo spacecraft has sent back some incredibly detailed images of Mercury's north pole. The snapshots were collected during its closest ever flyby of our solar system's smallest planet. You can check out the awe-inspiring images below. On January 8, the robotic explorer operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) came as close as 183 miles above Mercury. The newly released images show permanently dark craters spotting the surface of the planet closest to our Sun. Nearby volcanic plains and the largest impact cater on Mercury–over 930 miles wide–are also visible.

A European spacecraft has blasted off on a quest to explore Jupiter and three of its ice-encrusted moons. Dubbed Juice, the robotic explorer set off on an eight-year journey Friday from French Guiana in South America, launching atop an Ariane rocket. Juice is taking a long, roundabout route. It should reach Jupiter in 2031 and spend three years buzzing Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. Then it will attempt to enter orbit around Ganymede, our solar system's largest moon. The three moons are believed to harbor underground oceans, where sea life could exist. If underground seas are confirmed, ice picks and a submarine could be next up.

Abstract--Interstellar objects (ISOs) are fascinating and underexplored be best implemented using small spacecraft. The unification of celestial objects, providing physical laboratories to ISO detection, orbit characterization, and cruise trajectory with understand the formation of our solar system and probe the learning-based G&C algorithms for accurate low-V flybys composition and properties of material formed in exoplanetary represents a nearly end-to-end simulation and assessment of a systems. The recent Planetary Science and Astrobiology mission to visit an ISO. This process is simulated using JPL's Decadal Survey emphasized that a dedicated mission to an interstellar SmallSat Development Testbed, which determines the feasibility object would have high scientific value. A dedicated ISOs with varying characteristics, including a discussion of state spacecraft could resolve the shape, rotation properties, surface covariance estimation over the course of a cruise, handoffs from morphology, and composition of an asteroid-like ISO. Mass traditional navigation approaches to novel autonomous navigation spectroscopy techniques can probe the gas composition of a for fast flyby regimes, and overall recommendations about comet-like ISO.

There were some tense hours at the operation center for the New Horizons mission when the spacecraft briefly lost contact with Earth on July 4, 2015, just days from its long-awaited flyby of Pluto. It's just one of many gripping moments in a book that Alan Stern, the mission leader and a co-author of "Chasing New Horizons" along with astrobiologist David Grinspoon, describes as a "techno-thriller about how the farthest planet was explored." Dr. Stern recently sat down for an interview in his Boulder, Colo., office, surrounded by photos and mementos from the New Horizons mission – a mission that took decades to convince NASA to get off the ground and another decade to travel 3 billion miles to the last unexplored planet in our solar system. The New Horizons spacecraft continues to explore the vast reaches of the Kuiper Belt, at the outer edge of our solar system. His responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

A stunning new Nasa image shows raging storms on Jupiter with clouds that stretch for thousands of miles - and it looks just like an oil painting. Nasa's Juno spacecraft was a little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter - or 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometres) - when it captured this mind-bending view of the planet's tumultuous atmosphere. The incredible colour-enhanced image was captured at a latitude of 48.9 degrees and depicts vasts swirling cloud formations that travel at about 129,000 mph (60 km/s) over the gas giant planet's surface. Jupiter fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge of the planet). Juno took this image of colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter's northern hemisphere on December 16, from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter's clouds The incredible colour-enhanced image, showing swirling cloud formations over the gas giant planet's surface, was captured at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has sent back stunning images from its descent down a mysterious gap between Saturn and its rings. The images provide'our closest look ever at Saturn's atmosphere and giant hurricane,' Nasa said. The spacecraft executed the daredevil plunge yesterday in the build up to its final'death dive' in September. Communications with the spacecraft went dark during the dive, but Nasa announced today that it has picked up radio signals from Cassini. Nasa's 70m-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone, California, managed to re-establish communications just after 08:00 BST (03:00 EST) today, and stunning images are already flooding in. Communications with the spacecraft went dark during the dive, but Nasa has today announced that it has picked up radio signals from Cassini.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is currently plunging into the gap between Saturn and its rings, a pioneering journey that could offer an unprecedented view of the planet. The first of the spaceship's 22 deep dives between Saturn and its innermost ring begun today at 10am BST (5am ET). Communications with the spacecraft have gone dark during the dive and will remain so for about a day afterwards while it makes scientific observations of the planet. Today Cassini has begun the first of 22 'Grand Finale Orbits' through an unexplored gap before taking its final plunge into the planet. This graphic shows these orbits alongside the Ring-Grazing orbits the craft has undergone over the past 13 years.