By New Scientist staff

It’s time to return to Mercury. The solar system’s boiling-hot innermost planet will have a visitor soon – a probe called BepiColombo, which is set to launch in October 2018. After seven years of journeying through the inner solar system, the spacecraft will enter Mercury’s orbit in 2025, and help to unravel the mysteries of this tiny, scorched planet.

Mercury is a bit of an enigma. Despite being so close to the sun and reaching temperatures of 350°C, NASA’s Messenger probe saw what looked like ice in the craters near the planet’s poles when it passed by in 2012. Messenger also found that Mercury has a tenuous atmosphere, even though it is blasted with intense radiation from the sun. And in 1974, NASA’s Mariner 10 probe detected a magnetic field on Mercury – a surprising find, as Venus, Mars, and the moon don’t have one.

Of all the planets in our Solar System, Jupiter is probably the most interesting to look at. It’s just a big ball of fast-moving gasses in all kinds of wild colors. The planet hosts storms that could swallow the entirety of Earth, and while we can see lots of neat things happening near the planet’s cloud tops it’s a lot more difficult to determine what is actually going on deeper inside the planet.

Now, thanks to some fancy calculations and jet stream models inspired by Earth’s own weather patterns, researchers have a new theory on just why Jupiter’s crazy bands seem so perfectly arranged.

In the study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists explain that the jet streams on the planet are likely cut off by magnetized gasses deeper within the planet. The jet streams control the flow of gasses around the planet’s outer atmosphere where colorful bands of ammonia twist around the planet. These jet streams stretch many miles into the planet, but stop once they reach the magnetized gasses closer to its center.

Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is the first named for a living person.

NASA’s first mission to the sun is set to launch on Saturday. The probe will have to withstand heat and radiation never previously experienced by any spacecraft https://cnn.it/2KNGkuQ

New Horizons may have seen a hydrogen wall just past the edge of the solar system, where the solar wind meets the stuff of interstellar space.

If an earthbound technology might be revolutionary in space, what does it take to find out?

This ‘rogue planet’ travels the universe without a star.

The astronomical observatory was founded by the Jesuits during the Spanish occupation and later transferred to the Philippine Commonwealth Weather Department. This was adjacent to the University of the Philippines campus of today south of Luneta Park. The observatory had a 19-inch refracting telescope, by far the largest in the Orient. The staff of the observatory includes five Jesuit fathers and twenty-five well-trained native assistants. The construction of a 19-inch refracting telescope and dome was in 1897.

US signal corps photo, US national archives.