As it sped away from Venus, NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft captured this seemingly peaceful view of a planet the size of Earth, wrapped in a dense, global cloud layer. But, contrary to its serene ...

Click to open image viewer. Mariner 10 was the seventh successful launch in the Mariner series and the first spacecraft to use the gravitational pull of one planet (Venus) to reach another (Mercury).

On Feb. 5, 1974, Mariner 10 took this first close-up photo of Venus. Made using an ultraviolet filter in its imaging system, the photo has been color-enhanced to bring out Venus’s cloudy atmosphere as ...

This image is a map projection of an oblique view. At the time of Mariner 10’s first Mercury flyby, the planet’s prime meridian (line of zero-degree longitude) was about 10° on the night side of the ...

NASA’s Messenger probe is the first to capture images of Mercury since the Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. Mariner 10 caught only one side of the planet, so researchers are giddy over images taken during ...

The old joke goes that the only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple is finding half a worm. Planetary scientists had a similar feeling on March 29, 1974, when the Mariner 10 space probe flew ...