Mercury

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet which is closest to our Sun. We see it as an evening or a morning star, close to where the Sun has just set or is about to rise, and observations of Mercury helped Copernicus understand that Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun, so displacing Earth from the centre of our system. In the 20th century, further observations of Mercury helped Einstein prove his general theory of relativity. For the last 50 years we have been sending missions there to reveal something of Mercury’s secrets and how those relate to the wider universe, and he latest, BepiColombo, is out there in space now.

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Guests

• Emma Bunce No other episodes
  Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics and Director of the Institute for Space at the University of Leicester
• David Rothery No other episodes
  Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University
• Carolin Crawford 20 episodes
  Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

Reading list

• All (X-ray) eyes on Mercury
  Emma Bunce (Astronomy & Geophysics, August 2023)
• The BepiColombo Mercury Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer: Science Goals, Instrument Performance and Operations
  Emma Bunce et al (Space Science Reviews, Nov 2020)
• Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World
  David A. Rothery (Springer, 2014) Google Books →

Related episodes

• The Planets
  
  27 May, 2004 520 Astronomy
• Venus
  
  27 Dec, 2018 520 Astronomy
• The Sun
  
  10 Jul, 2014 520 Astronomy
• Exoplanets
  
  3 Oct, 2013 520 Astronomy
• The Kuiper Belt
  
  2 Mar, 2017 520 Astronomy
• Mars
  
  11 Jan, 2007 520 Astronomy
• The Moon
  
  3 Nov, 2011 520 Astronomy
• Eclipses
  
  31 Dec, 2020 520 Astronomy
• Saturn
  
  14 Jan, 2016 520 Astronomy
• Asteroids
  
  3 Nov, 2005 520 Astronomy

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Programme ID: m001yqp3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yqp3

Auto-category: 523.43 (Mercury (Planet))

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Mercury is the planet closest to our sun and as it's visible to the naked eye it's intrigued humanity for as long as we've been here.