Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion Options

[Rem31]

How will it be to make a manned landing at Mercury at its closest to the sun (perihelion) on its equator when the sun is in the zenith ,what are the dangers of a landing then? Do we need to be protected against the sunheat and radiation then? How strong is the heat and radiation of the sun then ,and is it dangerous when the solaractivity is high then? What kind of spacesuits do we need then? Better protected suits than we have used on the apollo moonlandings i think. Can you explain how a landing on Mercury will be when it is at perihelion and land on its equator with the sun directly overhead? I hope it will ever happen. Lets start discuss about it.

[ljk4-1]

Dr. Robert Bussard of the Bussard ramjet interstellar vessel concept fame,
has been promoting a new type of fusion engine called inertial electrostatic
confinement fusion (IEC).

IEC involves "a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly
into electricity producing helium as the only waste product."

See this video of a talk Bussard gave on the IEC for the details:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion

By Dr. Robert W. Bussard

57th IAC, Valencia, Spain, October 2-6, 2006

http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006...IAC%20Paper.pdf

So there may be no point in going to Mercury to mine Helium 3. Speaking
of mining Mercury, what minerals might the planet have that would make
going there for that purpose worth it? No doubt mining the planetoids would
be much easier and cheaper. Perhaps Mercury would make a good solar
observation station.

[JRehling]

So there may be no point in going to Mercury to mine Helium 3. Speaking
of mining Mercury, what minerals might the planet have that would make
going there for that purpose worth it? No doubt mining the planetoids would
be much easier and cheaper. Perhaps Mercury would make a good solar
observation station.

I'm not sure if it would be worth going to Mercury for Helium 3 even if that were the only form of fusion and it worked great. In fact, I doubt it. By no means is there anything else on Mercury would going to get and bring back. You'd lose money bringing diamonds back from Mercury even if they were already pre-cut and in fireproof burlap sacks.

This may be hard to believe, but the minimum-energy path to Mercury is greater than that to any other solid object... in the universe. And there's no atmosphere to brake your descent. And the escape velocity is nontrivial for your trip home, with the same delta-v on the way back to Earth. A muscular there-and-back mission could take place FASTER than one to Pluto, but far more expensively.

There would be no reason to send a (visual) solar observatory to Mercury. Why not just orbit the Sun at the same distance -- what use is it to have the ground beneath you, at an alarming increase of delta-v (and spending ~50% of the time unable to see your target) for the privilege?

I'd go back to the start here and opine that it wouldn't be worth going to Mercury for Helium 3 even if the only other form of energy available to the human species was burning wood and scaling back our population to pre-industrial levels. Basically, I don't think it's a break-even no matter what. Mercury is not economically viable.