Mercury

Introduction

The difficulty in seeing it notwithstanding, Mercury was known at least by Sumerian times, some 5,000 years ago. In Classical Greece it was called Apollo when it appeared as a morning star just before sunrise and Hermes, the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mercury, when it appeared as an evening star just after sunset. Hermes was the swift messenger of the gods, and the planet's name is thus likely a reference to its rapid motions relative to other objects in the sky. Even in more recent eras, many sky observers passed their entire lifetimes without ever seeing Mercury. It is reputed that Nicolaus Copernicus, whose heliocentric model of the heavens in the 16th century explained why Mercury and Venus always appear in close proximity to the Sun, expressed a deathbed regret that he had never set eyes on the planet Mercury himself.

Until the last part of the 20th century, Mercury was one of the least-understood planets, and even now the shortage of information about it leaves many basic questions unsettled. Indeed, the length of its day was not determined until the 1960s, and, even after the flybys of the Mariner 10 and Messenger ( Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) probes, the appearance of much of its surface is still unknown. At first glance the hemisphere of the planet that has been imaged looks similar to the cratered terrain of the Moon, an impression reinforced by the roughly comparable size of the two bodies. Mercury is far denser, however, having a metallic core that takes up about 42 percent of its volume (compared with 4 percent for the Moon and 16 percent for Earth). Moreover, its surface shows significant differences from lunar terrain, including a lack of the massive dark-coloured lava flows known as maria on the Moon and the presence of buckles and scarps that suggest Mercury actually shrank during some period in its history. Mercury's nearness to the Sun has given scientists bound to Earth many observational hurdles, which are now being overcome by spacecraft missions—such as that of Messenger, which was launched in 2004, flew past the planet in 2008, and is scheduled to fly past it again in 2008 and 2009 before settling into orbit in 2011. The same characteristic has also been exploited to confirm predictions made by relativity theory about the way gravity affects space and time.