| Description: | Short answer: No. :)
Long answer: Being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury subject to intense solar radiation and varying severity of solar wind. The planet itself has the largest iron core fraction of the terrestrial planets with 80% of its radius, resulting in a internally produced magnetic field. The interaction of the planetary magnetic field with the impinging solar wind produces a global magnetosphere, that albeit qualitatively similar that to Earth and Jupiter, being quantitatively smaller by a factor of twenty. This results in a magnetosphere that lacks many features we know from its bigger sisters, and therefore should not really work, questioning our understanding of how magnetospheres are actually working. Additionally, the surface is bombarded by the solar wind and radiation, whose sputtering and desorption processes result in a tenuous exosphere mainly consisting of sodium. While tenuous, the exospheric particles are populating the magnetosphere and can even increase the magnetospheric volume. Let us dive into our current understanding of the Hermean environment by investigating spacecraft observations of the late Mariner 10 and MESSENGER missions, Earth-based observations and results of global numerical modelling efforts. Being the target of the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission, I will also show how future observations by Bepi could expand our understanding of these first world problems. |
