This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Mercury remains one of our solar system's most elusive and difficult planets to study. It's easier to send probes to the icy moons of Saturn or Jupiter, or even to Pluto, than to land on our innermost planet, Mercury.
Ground-based optical observatories risk damaging their optics in the glare of the nearby sun when they turn their sights on Mercury. Thus, of the planets in our inner solar system, Mercury arguably remains both the least explored and most misunderstood. NASA's Mariner 10 performed three flybys of Mercury between 1974 and 1975.
This was followed by a 2011 orbital insertion by NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury, which successfully orbited the planet for some four years. But despite the European Space Agency's and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's long-anticipated joint BepiColombo mission to Mercury, we aren't likely to solve this strange little world's conundrums until someone figures out a way to send a lander that can safely land and function long enough to return data that would give us a much clearer indication of Mercury's surface composition and its interior. BepiColombo, which is scheduled to enter orbit late next month, is currently our only chance to acquire new data about the planet.
However, it's not expected to start collecting science data until April 2027. After BepiColombo, there's nothing on the drawing board, Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me via email.
But a lander is the next natural step in the exploration of Mercury, even if it's a technically challenging and expensive proposition, Byrne told me. Without a lander mission, Mercury's main science puzzles will remain. We're beginning to find evidence for much larger, more massive rocky exoplanets that seem to have giant iron cores, says Byrne.
So, he wonders if Mercury is a one-off freak or a planetary outcome that's more common than we might think. Two major hypotheses have been formulated to explain the presence of a large metallic core. The first one posits that Mercury accreted from building blocks richer in metal than those of other planets, such as Earth, Anne Pommier, a staff scientist and high-pressure experimentalist at the Carnegie Laboratory in Washington, D.C., told me via email.
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