WE PROPOSE LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO INVESTIGATE HOW REDUCED CONDITION OF ACCRETION AND CORE FORMATION IN MERCURY CONTROLLED THE REDISTRIBUTION OF SI AND C BETWEEN CORE-FORMING AND MANTLE-FORMING MATERIALS IN A GLOBAL MAGMA OCEAN. OUR EXPERIMENTS WILL SIMULATE THE EXPECTED PRESSURE-TEMPERATURE CONDITIONS OF THE MAGMA OCEAN (UP TO 7 GIGAPASCALS) AND CORE (UP TO 40 GIGAPASCALS) IN LARGE-VOLUME PRESSES AND MEASURE THE SOLUBILITY AND SPECIATION OF CARBON IN LIQUID IRON ALLOYS ENRICHED IN SILICON. THE RESULTS OF THESE EXPERIMENTS WILL BE USED TO PRODUCE A PLAUSIBLE RANGE OF COMPOSITIONS FOR MERCURY S CORE WHICH IN COMBINATION WITH AN ASSUMED (E.G. METEORITE-LIKE) PRIMORDIAL COMPOSITION WILL CONSTRAIN THE COMPOSITION OF THE PLANET S MANTLE AND BY PETROLOGIC EXTENSION ITS CRUST. CORE COMPOSITIONS WILL ALSO BE USED IN NUMERICAL MODELING OF THE PHYSICAL CHEMICAL AND THERMAL STATE OF THE CORE INCLUDING THE PRECIPITATION AND DISSOLUTION OF CARBON. IN TURN THESE WILL PROVIDE THE BASIS OF A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF DYNAMO OPERATION AND THE STRENGTH AND GEOMETRY OF THE MAGNETIC FIELD AROUND THIS ENIGMATIC PLANET. THE PROPOSED RESEARCH IS RELEVANT TO NASA S SOLAR SYSTEM WORKINGS PROGRAM THROUGH PERFORMING BOTH EXPERIMENTS AND NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE CORE THE OPERATION OF THE MAGNETODYNAMO AND THE STRENGTH AND GEOMETRY OF THE PLANET S SURFACE MAGNETIC FIELD.