I found a little movie showing the progress of Mercury MESSENGER towards Mercury. It will finally enter Mercury's orbit in 2011.

Mercury is a strange planet. It orbits the sun once every 88 earth days, but it rotates extremely slowly. The proximity to the sun makes days on Mercury into blisteringly hot affairs (up to 700 degrees F). There is also no atmosphere to buffer the heat loss and heat gain on the planet. However, this same effect means that Mercury also loses heat very quickly, making its night side among the coldest in the Solar System (-500 F).
However, while the Earth spins much faster than we could ever travel, you could ostensibly try and walk along Mercury's limb in order to stay in perpetual twilight or dawn, right around room temperature. See: The Chronicles of Riddick, Planet Crematoria. I was doing a calculation to see how fast you'd have to walk, but it's complicated, you see. If you go here then you can see how a day would look on the surface. Since Mercury rotates so slowly, the planet's position with respect to the sun is changing faster than it is rotating. In fact, at one point in its orbit, it would look like the sun is standing still, or even going backwards! That means that depending on the time of day and the time of year, you would need to move slower or faster to stay right at the right temperature.

It's the job of NASA-type people to think about these problems with regards to sending a lander to Mercury. Is it better to try and build a rover that can withstand the ridiculous temperature changes between night and day, or it is better to build a swift and nimble rover that can navigate across the surface at whatever speed NASA wants?
Naturally, you'd have to factor in Mercury's gigantic scarps, which can be up to a kilometer (~.62mi) high and thousands of kilometers long. It might take just a bit longer to navigate those on your way around the planet. Keep in mind that a typical one-way light time (the lag between when you send a command to your rover and when it recieves it) is about 10 minutes! No chance for last minute corrective maneuvers!

You can see how building and operating a Mercurian rover would be a Herculean effort. Just getting into orbit around this tiny planet instead of crashing into the sun will be a huge accomplishment. But we haven't even talked about Venus yet!

I WANNA READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
» Dilated on 2008-02-01 08:52:23

Actually, nevermind. It must be hidden got a reason
» Dilated on 2008-02-01 08:52:53

Have you heard about the "spider" on mercury? Very interesting..There's been alot of interesting things going on, on mars as well.

P.S. Chronicles of riddick was kinda awesome :P
» lyndeep on 2008-02-01 01:18:37

I've only seen parts of that movie.
But one of those parts was running away from the sunrise. And it was intense.

Pretty cool about the sun's odd movement, too.
» middaymoon on 2008-02-01 08:08:47

Well I guess that if you lived on Mercury at least you'd get a lot of exercise.
» randomjunk on 2008-02-01 08:36:17

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