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.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

God, yes. We've mentioned all this before. A manned landing under such conditions presents huge problems even if you don't try to get out of your ship and walk around -- it presents staggering problems for any space suit design. Very large-scale daytime surface exploration of Mercury, whenever the human race ever gets around to it, is yet another opportunity to utilize remote-control robots controlled from a nearby, non-landed and Sun-shielded manned ship (which could be hundreds of thousands of km from Mercury, thus avoiding the emitted IR heat from the planet's surface itself).

[JRehling]

God, yes. We've mentioned all this before. A manned landing under such conditions presents huge problems even if you don't try to get out of your ship and walk around -- it presents staggering problems for any space suit design. Very large-scale daytime surface exploration of Mercury, whenever the human race ever gets around to it, is yet another opportunity to utilize remote-control robots controlled from a nearby, non-landed and Sun-shielded manned ship (which could be hundreds of thousands of km from Mercury, thus avoiding the emitted IR heat from the planet's surface itself).

It could also suffice to put humans on a nighttime location on Mercury (including the permanently-shaded craters near the poles) communicating by satellite with surface robots on the dayside.

These projects should be very competitive proposals a few centuries from now.

Any way you slice it, a landing on Mercury is probably the most resource-intensive of anywhere, even if it's merely a large robotic craft. Any such plan would probably require unforeseeable advances in propulsion (among other things) to ever be funded. And I would seriously expect the state of robotics to move along significantly in such a timeframe, whittling down the utility of human telepresence faster than the means to send people there cheaply increases.

Note that even for humans to fly by Mercury (which would be the least ambitious plan, using their "momentary" telepresence to guide robotic drones below) would either require colossal delta-v on a mission putting them into point-blank range for solar flare radiation for months, or use Venus gravity assists to put them in similar hazard for years with somewhat less delta-v. Requirements for shielding would be ungodly, increasing all of the delta-v requirements. It almost starts to sound like it'd be cheaper to propel Mercury to us, study it at 1AU, and put it back when we're done.

[JRehling]

It could also suffice to put humans on a nighttime location on Mercury (including the permanently-shaded craters near the poles) communicating by satellite with surface robots on the dayside.

It occurred to me that humans on Earth have, at times, a speed-of-light-time to Mercury of about 5 minutes. There are various wrinkles to that, with solar conjunction interfering with communication and it being the nightside that would face us, but those have workarounds. All told, I think a scheme that makes do with 10-minute roundtrip time and slow teleoperation would beat the almost insane challenges of sending people near Mercury. Never say never, but it makes me wonder if in a hypothetical prosperous and space-faring future, Saganite paradise and all, we still might nonetheless never send people to Mercury. It would seemingly have to be done just for the point of doing it. Odd that it would be true for a place that comes within 0.8 AU of us more often than anyplace but Venus and the Moon, but then the Sun is the only place besides the Moon that is always within 1.1 AU of us, and we're not sending people there, either.