Mercury

Mercury. . , It’s really hot, really rocky and it’s blasted full of craters! Ya’ gotta love this spunky little planet!! It’s named for the winged messenger of the gods because it moves so quickly across the night sky. Compared to our year of 365 days, Mercury only requires 88 Earthdays to orbit the Sun. Is that fast enough for your bad self? Crazily, it takes 59 days to spin on its axis but this is not the length of its day. In the time it takes to spin once it also travels two thirds of the way around the Sun. This means that the time between two sunsets on Mercury is 176 Earth days. Mercury’s day ends up being twice as long as its year, so birthdays happen more often than sunsets!! , Mariner 10 , Only one spacecraft, Mariner 10 in 1974, has been sent to visit Mercury. Mariner completed only three orbits, so to this day over half the planet remains unphotographed. The Hubble Space Telescope can’t help because Mercury is so close to the Sun that its rays would blind HST’s sensitive instruments., Craters Make the News!?! , Mercury is pock-marked with thousands of craters. Since it has no atmosphere, meteorites don’t burn up on their way in like they do on Earth. Every one of them gets through unhindered leaving enormous impact craters. Additionally, since there is no weather on Mercury, the dust and sand around these impacts lay undisturbed for billions of years. Mercury zips through space at 107,000 mph, yet even this is not enough to disturb a single grain of sand!, Caloris Planitia is 875 miles across , that’s crater all the way from Traverse City to Atlanta, folks! When the asteroid hit 3.6 billion years ago the shock was so intense that it created hills and fractures on the opposite side of the planet!!, …In other crater-related news, on Mercury they’re named after artists, poets and their ilk. Sure Van Gogh, Dickens and Mozart have been immortalized but with thousands of craters you’d think they’d find room for Queen’s Freddie MERCURY, fer crying out loud. I mean, cuz like Queen rocks, dude!, Gee, Einstein Really Was Smarter Than The Rest Of Us… , By the early 1900’s it was well known that Mercury’s actual orbit didn’t match the orbit dictated by classic Newtonian Physics. Many astronomers of the day insisted they would find a new planet between the Sun and Mercury. The gravity of this new planet would be responsible for Mercury’s wandering orbit. They even named the undiscovered planet “Vulcan” (Remember Mr. Spock?). This infamous orbit was finally explained by Albert Einstein and his new Theory of Relativity. Einstein understood that this orbital glitch is created by our massive Sun warping the nearby Space-Time continuum, which Mercury is part of. His ability to correctly explain Mercury’s orbit was the first confirmation that Albert’s crazy, new way of viewing the Universe was indeed the correct way., P.S. , You can look this stuff up if you want to. We did but we really didn’t understand very much of it. It was 20 pages of words like “perihelion” and equations like this one: , d²z/dA² + (1-3(V/c)²)²z = G/H² + 2GE/c², Mercury , the 1st Planet , Diameter: 3,032 miles , Distance from the Sun: 36 million miles , Speed around the Sun: 107,000 mph , Time to Orbit the Sun: 88 Earth Days , Length of Day: 176 Earth Days , Temperature Range: -292 F to 806 F , Mass: 5.5% of Earth , Gravity: 38% of Earth’s , Moons: 0. , [captions] , . Spock: Einstein knew that his Vulcan home was simply “illogical.” , . Because of its smallish size, Mercury’s gravity is only a third of that on Earth. You could easily jump over an elephant there! (Except they don’t have elephants on Mercury.)