NASA’s Genesis spacecraft, planned to launch in February, has been postponed until June. Genesis will collect samples of the solar wind and return to Earth in 2004 for scientists to study the samples.

The European Space Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft is going to Mercury after a fly-by at Venus. At Mercury, the craft will split into three pieces. The main piece will fly a few hundred miles over the surface and map the unseen hemisphere and polar regions. The second piece will go into an elliptical orbit to study the magnetosphere and interaction with the solar wind. The third piece is a lander, and will measure heat flow at the surface of Mercury.