In this TEDx talk, Prof David Rothery will describe how, more or less by accident, he found himself a key player in the European Space Agency’s current mission to Mercury, a problem planet whose composition and history is not what was expected. He will recount how his 30 year involvement with the project, BepiColombo, led up to a launch in 2018 and a series of fly-bys of the planet 2021-2025. He will show images from BepiColombo’s January 2025 flyby and from NASA’s MESSENGER orbiter, and will look ahead to some of the things he hopes to learn after BepiColombo goes into orbit about Mercury late next year when it will begin to return much better data. David Rothery is a geologist and Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University, and recently secured a share in a £3 million, 5 year project to do science with the new data (2026-2031). In this TEDx talk, Prof David Rothery will describe how, more or less by accident, he found himself a key player in the European Space Agency’s current mission to Mercury, a problem planet whose composition and history is not what was expected. He will recount how his 30 year involvement with the project, BepiColombo, led up to a launch in 2018 and a series of fly-bys of the planet 2021-2025. He will show images from BepiColombo’s January 2025 flyby and from NASA’s MESSENGER orbiter, and will look ahead to some of the things he hopes to learn after BepiColombo goes into orbit about Mercury late next year when it will begin to return much better data. David Rothery is a geologist and Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University, and recently secured a share in a £3 million, 5 year project to do science with the new data (2026-2031). This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx