Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus will venture inside the orbit of Mercury to study the Sun. The temperatures on the front surfaces of these satellites will go into the high hundreds of degrees Celsius, and beyond. You could say they are the missions to Hell.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
