The current knowledge of Mercury's orbit has mainly been gained by direct radar ranging obtained from the 60s to 1998 and by five Mercury flybys made with Mariner 10 in the 70s, and with MESSENGER made in . On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The radioscience observations acquired during the orbital phase of MESSENGER drastically improved our knowledge of the orbit of Mercury. An accurate MESSENGER orbit is obtained by fitting one-and-half years of tracking data using GINS orbit determination software. The systematic error in the Earth-Mercury geometric positions, also called range bias, obtained from GINS are then used to fit the INPOP dynamical modeling of the planet motions. An improved ephemeris of the planets is then obtained, INPOP13a, and used to perform general relativity tests of the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. Our estimations of PPN parameters (γ and β) are more stringent than previous results.

We analyze radio tracking data obtained during 1311 orbits of the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft in the period March 2011 to April 2014. A least squares minimization of the residuals between observed and computed values of two‐way range and Doppler allows us to solve for a model describing Mercury's gravity, tidal response, and spin state. We use a spherical harmonic representation of the gravity field to degree and order 40 and report error bars corresponding to 10 times the formal uncertainties of the fit. Our estimate of the product of Mercury's mass and the gravitational constant, GM = (22031.87404 ± 9×10−4) km3 s−2, is in excellent agreement with published results. Our solution for the geophysically important second‐degree coefficients ( trueC̄2,0=−2.25100×10−5±1.3×10−9, trueC̄2,2=1.24973×10−5±1.2×10−9) confirms previous estimates to better than 0.4% and, therefore, inferences about Mercury's moment of inertia and interior structure. Our estimate of the tidal Love number k2 = 0.464 ± 0.023 indicates that Mercury's mantle may be hotter and weaker than previously thought. Our spin state solution suggests that gravity‐based estimates of Mercury's spin axis orientation are marginally consistent with previous measurements of the orientation of the crust.