In Our Time: Mercury

Melvyn Bragg leads a discussion on the planet Mercury, the closest to the Sun. It can be seen as an evening or a morning star, close to where the Sun has just set or is about to rise. Observations of Mercury helped Copernicus understand that Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun, so displacing Earth from the centre of our system. In the 20th century, further observations of Mercury helped Einstein prove his general theory of relativity. For the last 50 years missions have revealed something of Mercury's secrets and how those relate to the wider universe, and the latest, BepiColombo, is out there in space now