[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
I had no idea about that “can’t fly to Mercury and just start orbiting the planet” thing. I’ve watched so much Star Trek that I consider achieving standard orbit to be something so simple that even a wet-behind-the-ears academy ensign could do it right on day 1 of a new assignment.
I forget our probes don’t come with impulse engines and infinite fuel.
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Really interesting
All they have to do is improve the flux capacitors…..
Mercury too hot? How sexist! Female science would view it as being normally temperatured and not impose a phallocentric heat on it.
The Mercury gravity-well problem impressed itself on me when I watched the movie “Sunshine”. Yeah, that planet really is too close to the sun and too low-grav to really get into it.
Kind of like how three of the four Jovian moons are too close to Jupiter’s magnetic field (and Io’s plasma output) for humans to bounce about their surfaces.
But we still got Venus’s cloud cities. And Callisto, in the latter case.