What If You Were Stuck On Mercury?

You wake up on Mercury, in the dark, with your dog Scout. On Mercury the sunrise moves at walking pace, so if you stop walking, it catches you. To survive, you have to walk for forty days. The readout in the corner counts down until sunrise catches you. A day on Mercury lasts 176 Earth days, so at the equator the dawn line moves at about 3.5 km/h. At home it sweeps past at 1,670 km/h. The ground swings from −180 °C at night to 430 °C at noon. Gravity is 0.38 g, so you weigh about a third of what you do on Earth. On the way you cross a 3 km cliff formed as Mercury shrank, the bright “hollows” found only on Mercury, and a double sunrise that happens because, near its closest pass to the Sun, Mercury orbits faster than it spins. At the north pole, the crater Prokofiev hides water ice in a shadow the Sun never reaches. The one thing we made up is the suits: yours and Scout’s keep you alive, but only in the dark. Everything else is real. The walking route and pace are our own estimates from the real dawn speeds. Nobody has ever stood on Mercury. MESSENGER crashed into it in April 2015 at about 14,000 km/h. BepiColombo has been braking toward Mercury since its 2018 launch and goes into orbit in November 2026. One of its jobs is to study that ice. Every what if, taken all the way. 0:00 Stop walking and you die 0:21 One step onto Mercury 0:51 The speed of sunrise 1:11 A third of your weight 1:36 430 °C by noon 1:51 The plan: ice at the pole 2:24 The long walk 2:54 A cliff 3 km high 3:29 Hollows 3:49 The sunrise slows down 4:04 The crater 4:20 The Sun’s edge 4:42 The Sun stops 5:14 The far north 5:35 Prokofiev 5:51 Ice 6:20 One last thing 6:52 Look up tonight #Mercury #Space #WhatIf #Astronomy #BepiColombo