Mercury

Mercury is a terrestrial planet located in the Solar System, the very first planet from the Sun, as well as the smallest. It has the fastest orbit of any planet in its system. Mercury has essentially zero atmosphere and receives the stronget sunlight, making it the perfect place for human solar power plants. Solar power is collected on the surface and "beamed" to any other world that may need it, as Mercury is also, on average, the closest to any other planet in the system.

Geography

Mercury is the smallet planet in the Solar System, also making it smaller (but still more massive) than the largest moons in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan. Mercury's surface is heavily createred, due to countless impact events over the course of its history. Similar to Earth's Moon, these craters are remarkably well-preserved as there is no atmosphere to erode them.
Mercury is very dense, consisting of about 70% metallic and 30% silicate material. Despite being noticably smaller than Mars, Mercury still has about the same surface gravity as the Red Planet thanks to its density.
Also similar to Earth's Moon, Mercury features extensive plains and cratering. Mercury's surface is more varied than the Moon's, containing massive stretches of similar geology, like plateaus or plains.

Climate

The surface temperature varies between -280 to 800 °F (-173 to 427 °C), due to the lack of any atmosphere. Despite these extreme temperatures, ice exists on the planet at its poles, specifically, at the bottom of deep craters where sunlight never reaches. These regions contain more than one hundred trillion kilograms of ice, covered by a loose blanket of dust and broken rocks known as regolith. Some of this ice is harvested, packaged, and filtered by the Coca-Cola Company multiplanetary corporation.

History

Humanity's first successful manned mission to Mercury landed on the planet on March 30th, 2005, less than a year after the conclusion of the Venus-based Aphrodite program. Thanks to said program, NASA was able to develop highly temperature-resistant spacesuits that could withstand the extreme day and night temperatures of the planet. The Ares program also contributed to NASA's knowledge of radiation exposure, and, more specifcally, how to prevent it, which also went into the spacesuits. Hermes 3 was the first mission to land man on the Swift Planet. The purpose of the Hermes program was to establish highly advanced solar power plants on the planet, as Mercury, being the closest planet to the Sun and having no atmosphere, receives by far the most sunlight out of any other planet in the system.
The Hermes program extended for 14 more missions, concluding with Hermes 17. What the program concluded with was a fully automatic power plant capable of harnessing an incredible amount of the Sun's energy. The power plant contained skyscraper-sized batteries that would hold the collected energy and beam the energy to "collection plants" on other bodies, in the form of extremely concentrated sunlight energy rays (one massive laser beam, essentially). Although still used and occasionally in operation for large projects, the development of fusion power and warp drives has rendered Mercury's only feasible purpose has been made mostly obsolete, especially in terms of interstellar travel.
On August 28th, 2095, the United Nation Federation started funding the construction of a small Dyson swarm using infrastructure and materials on Mercury. Even six years into the project, the swarm of thousands of small mirrors orbiting the Sun still supply an enormous amount of energy to the Solar System, which is beamed to Mercury and, then, to whichever planet or moon needs it. Nobody currently lives on Mercury, as the Dyson swarm project is entirely composed of self-replicating robots.

Designations

Classification	Planet
Type	Terrestrial
Alternative names	Sol I
Adjective	Mercurian

Location Data

Star	Sun
Moons	None
Star system	Solar System
Spiral arm	Orion Arm
Galaxy	Milky Way

Orbit & Rotation

Rotation period	176 standard days
Orbital period	88 standard days 0.5 Mercury days

Surface Characteristics

Surface gravity	0.38 g
Surface temperature	153 °F (-279 °F to 801 °F) 67 °C (-173 °C to 427 °C)