EXPLORING THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE SWIFT PLANET
Visiting Mercury is a dangerous and difficult task. Navigating a spacecraft here requires propulsion that will get it to Mercury but also counteract the gravity of the Sun so the craft doesn’t go falling into its surface and burn up. This is why only two spacecraft have ever visited the small planet. NASA has been the operator of both of these, the first being Mariner 10 in 1974, which conducted a series of flybys and gathered close-up images.