All About Mercury...





Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system.
It’s just a little bigger than Earth’s moon. 
It is the closest planet to the sun, but it’s actually not the hottest. Venus is hotter.
Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System. It is named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger of the gods.
Mercury is gravitationally locked with the Sun in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance,and rotates in a way that is unique in the Solar System. As seen relative to the fixed stars, it rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun.
Mercury's axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System's planets (about ​1⁄30 degree).
Mercury's distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion. Mercury's surface appears heavily cratered and is similar in appearance to the Moon's, indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years.
Two spacecraft have visited Mercury: Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 and 1975; and MESSENGER, launched in 2004, orbited Mercury over 4,000 times in four years before exhausting its fuel and crashing into the planet's surface on April 30, 2015.
Mercury's crust is estimated to be 35 km thick.
Geologists estimate that Mercury's core occupies about 55% of its volume; for Earth this proportion is 17%. 

The surface temperature of Mercury ranges from 100 K to 700 K at the most extreme places: 0°N, 0°W, or 180°W. It never rises above 180 K at the poles, due to the absence of an atmosphere and a steep temperature gradient between the equator and the poles.
The subsolar point reaches about 700 K during perihelion (0°W or 180°W), but only 550 K at aphelion (90° or 270°W).On the dark side of the planet, temperatures average 110 K. The intensity of sunlight on Mercury's surface ranges between 4.59 and 10.61 times the solar constant (1,370 W·m−2).
Although the daylight temperature at the surface of Mercury is generally extremely high, observations strongly suggest that ice (frozen water) exists on Mercury. 

Despite its small size and slow 59-day-long rotation, Mercury has a significant, and apparently global, magnetic field.
Mercury has the most eccentric orbit of all the planets; its eccentricity is 0.21 with its distance from the Sun ranging from 46,000,000 to 70,000,000 km (29,000,000 to 43,000,000 mi). It takes 87.969 Earth days to complete an orbit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All about JUPITER...

Image
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. It is approximately 143,000 kilometers (about 89,000 miles) wide at its equator. Jupiter is so large that all of the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it. More than 1,300 Earths would fit inside Jupiter. Jupiter  is the fifth  planet  from the  Sun  and the  largest  in the  Solar System . Jupiter is primarily composed of  hydrogen  with a quarter of its mass being  helium , though helium comprises only about a tenth of the number of molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the other giant planets, Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface. Surrounding Jupiter is a faint  planetary ring  system and a powerful  magnetosphere . Jupiter has at least  69 moons , including the four large  Galilean moons  discovered by  Galileo Galilei  in 1610.  Ganymede , the largest of these, has a d...
Read more

Sailing Stones....

Image
Sailing stones , also known as  sliding rocks ,  walking rocks ,  rolling stones , and  moving rocks , are a  geological phenomenon  where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. Instead, rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind and  shove  rocks at up to 5 m/min. Trails of sliding rocks have been observed and studied in various locations, including Little Bonnie Claire Playa in Nevada,and most famously at  Racetrack Playa ,  Death Valley National Park , California, where the number and length of tracks are notable. The Racetrack's stones speckle the playa floor, predominantly in the southern portion. Historical accounts identify some stones around 100 m (300 ft) from shore, yet most o...
Read more

First Indian Woman in Space!!

Image
Kalpana Chawla   was an American astronaut and the first woman of Indian origin in space. Chawla was born on 17 March 1962, but her official date of birth was altered to 1 July 1961 to allow her to become eligible for the matriculation exam. In 1988, she began working at NASA, where she did  computational fluid dynamics  (CFD) research on  vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL)  concepts. Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997, as part of the six-astronaut crew that flew the  Space Shuttle Columbia  flight  STS-87 . Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second Indian person to fly in space, following astronaut  Rakesh Sharma  who flew in 1984 on the  Soyuz T-11 . She spoke the following words while traveling in the weightlessness of space, "You are just your intelligence". On her first mission, Chawla traveled over 10.4 million miles (16737177.6 K M) in 252 orbits of the ea...
Read more