What Makes Mercury Almost Impossible To Visit?

During the first wave of space exploration, the first planet that mankind visited was our neighbor Venus in 1962. After that was Mars in 1965, then Jupiter in 1973. It wasn’t until 1974 that Mercury was explored.

Considering Mercury can get so close to earth at times, you would think that it would be one of the first planets that we’d attempt to visit. When Mercury is at its closest point to Earth, astronomers call this opposition (from the point of view of Mercury). This would happen when Mercury was at its furthest from the Sun, and Earth is at its closest. When this happens, Mercury and Earth would be separated by only 77 million km (48 million miles).

For comparison, Jupiter is 588 million kilometers, or 496.76 million miles, from earth. That is almost eight times the distance from the earth to mercury. What’s more unsettling is that Jupiter has been visited on a number of occasions. Once in 1974, twice in 1979, 1992, 1995, 2000 and 2007!
Multiple missions were launched to explore the likes of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. We’ve even branched out to visit things like comets and asteroids. But Mercury? Nothing for over 30 years. Why? Surely it can’t be that uninteresting. Does Mercury hold no further secrets for us to uncover? No. In fact, the first and only mission to mercury was a flyby, and it only managed to map around 45 percent of the surface.