WHAT’S NEW AT MERCURY?
Which planet is Earth’s nearest neighbour in the Solar System? The obvious answer is Venus, which makes the closest approach to us – but it spends half its orbit on the other side of the Sun, when it’s further away from us than Mercury. It was only last year that Tom Stockman, a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and colleagues crunched the numbers to work out which planet is actually closest on average – and they were as surprised as anyone by the answer: “When averaged over time, Earth’s nearest neighbour is in fact Mercury,” they wrote.
Despite its proximity, Mercury has always been a mysterious planet due to the difficulty of observing it through Earth-based telescopes. That’s down to
