Mercury's Perihelion Precession as a Diagnostic of Space-Phase Structure Why Only the Innermost Orbit Reveals the Mechanism

Mercury is unique among the planets in exhibiting a measurable secular precession of itsorbital perihelion. Traditionally treated as a small correction to Newtonian gravity and lateras a triumph of relativistic geometry, this anomaly can instead be viewed as a diagnosticsignal revealing the physical structure of space itself. Within the Space-Phase (SP3)framework, Mercury’s precession is not an incidental detail but a consequence of itsrepeated deep penetration into the Sun’s strongly conditioned space-phase. More distantplanets, whose orbits remain confined to stable grooves of already-relaxed space-phase,do not experience comparable effects. This paper argues that the presence or absence ofprecession across planetary orbits is best understood not as a distance effect alone, but asan overlap criterion between orbital space-phase envelopes and the Sun’s central spacephase stiffness region. Mercury’s orbit thus serves as a natural diagnostic probe of spacephase structure in the solar system.