RESOURCES OF MERCURY

Mercury has received much less attention than other planets and moons in the solar system. It has only been flown by up close by the Mariner 10 probe in the 70s, then orbited briefly by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft thirty years later. Almost all the attention on Mercury has been scientific, without much thought for its practical uses.

Mercury’s orbital location close to the sun means it receives a 4–10Å~ higher solar flux than at Earth: if converted to electricity with advanced solar cells, the power generation potential is staggering. If used as concentrated sunlight, raw materials can be directly refined to metals and forged into useful final products.

Mercury’s surface material is mostly rocky soil, but at the poles there are permanently shadowed craters that collectively host billions of tons of ice and hydrocarbons. Other enigmatic features called hollows are found all over Mercury and may have deposits of different useful elements like sulfur and chlorine. Of particular note is that Mercury is the most oxygen-poor planet in the solar system, and up to 15% of the regolith may be already-reduced silicon metal, which could be readily extracted and used to build solar photovoltaics and compute resources.

While Mars has been pitched as the most sensible next destination for humans, a civilization interested in power and compute may be drawn inwards instead, and Mercury offers a nearly endless supply of raw materials for large-scale in-space construction efforts.