Interesting Orbits Throughout the Solar System

[JoeStrout]

OK, let's go planet by planet!  Starting with Mercury.

Mercury is about 58 million km from the Sun (compared to Earth's 150 million km).  So, if my math is right, solar intensity should be 6.67 times higher.  (Oh, and I just found this handy table, which seems to agree.)  That's very good for powering things with solar power, if you're in a high enough Mercury orbit that you're not passing through the planet's shadow all the time.

It might also mean more difficulty staying cool, though.  But radiators, edge-on to the Sun, should work just as well there as anywhere else; they might just have to be bigger.

As a source of materials, Mercury looks pretty good.  Very rich in iron, with lots of silicates (silicon/oxygen/metal compounds) in its crust.

The sun side gets super hot, of course... over 400°C (or 800°F).  Mining operations could be challenging there.  But it rotates so slowly that one spot on the surface gets about 88 Earth days of sunlight, followed by that many days of darkness.  In the images below, the red dot identifies one point (and the little red line points straight up from the surface).  "Day 58" etc. counts Earth days since sunrise.

So, you could probably have just have two mining bases, and at sunrise, cover and abandon that one, and move everybody to the sunset one.  Work that through the night, and then switch back to the first.

Finally, the surface gravity is only 3.7 m/s^2, or 38% of Earth's (virtually identical to Mars, coincidentally).  So getting that stuff up to the colony would be reasonably cheap, though not as cheap as from a moon or asteroid of course.

So, what do you think?  Good place for space colonies?  What would drive folks to build here rather than somewhere else?

Incidentally, I'm no expert in this stuff; I have a web browser and Google, the same as anybody else.  So if I've missed anything or screwed up somewhere, somebody please say so!