Ten Interesting Facts About Mercury

Ten Interesting facts about Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god. He is the god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication (including divination), travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he also serves as the guide of souls to the underworld

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Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth’s orbit as an inferior planet, and never exceeds 28° away from the Sun. When viewed from Earth, this proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western or eastern horizon during the early evening or early morning. At this time it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is often far more difficult to observe than Venus. The planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, as it moves in its inner orbit relative to Earth, which reoccurs over the so-called synodic period approximately every 116 days.

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Mercury’s axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System’s planets (about ​1⁄30 degree). Its orbital eccentricity is the largest of all known planets in the Solar System; at perihelion, Mercury’s distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion.

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Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System.  A sidereal day (the period of rotation) lasts about 58.7 Earth days.

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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. Having almost no atmosphere to retain heat, it has surface temperatures that vary diurnally more than on any other planet in the Solar System, ranging from 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) during the day across the equatorial regions. The polar regions are constantly below 180 K (−93 °C; −136 °F). The planet has no known natural satellites. 

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Unlike many other planets which “self-heal” through natural geological processes, the surface of Mercury is covered in craters. These are caused by numerous encounters with asteroids and comets. Most Mercurian craters are named after famous writers and artists. Any crater larger than 250 kilometres in diameter is referred to as a Basin.

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The largest known crater is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The impact that created the Caloris Basin was so powerful that it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring over 2 km tall surrounding the impact crater.

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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.

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It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largestnatural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.  

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As if Mercury isn’t small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet’s volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high, as well as Mercury’s “Great Valley,” which at about 620 miles long, 250 miles wide and 2 miles deep (1,000 by 400 by 3.2 km) is larger than Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon and deeper than the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. 

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The first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by Galileo in the early 17th century. Although he observed phases when he looked at Venus, his telescope was not powerful enough to see the phases of Mercury.

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images: Joseph Brimacombe, NASA/JPL, Wikimedia Commons

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Why worry about building a colony on Mars when instead you could float one high above the surface of Venus? Science fiction writer Charles Stross recently revived the idea of building a Venutian colony when he suggested, cheekily, that billionaires ought to be compelled to donate to massive humanity-improving projects. He suggested two: a Manhattan Project-like focus on developing commercial nuclear fusion, or the construction of a floating city on Venus. 

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Believe it or not, a floating city might be a feasible project. Scientist and science fiction author Geoffrey Landis presented a paper called “Colonizing Venus” [PDF] at the Conference on Human Space Exploration, Space Technology & Applications International Forum in Albuquerque, New Mexico back in 2003. Breathable air floats in Venus’s soupy carbon dioxide atmosphere, which means on Venus, a blimp could use air as its lifting gas, the way terrestrial blimps use helium to float in our much thinner atmosphere.

This figure shows the volcanic peak Idunn Mons in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The topography derives from data obtained by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, with a vertical exageration of 30 times. Radar data (in brown) from Magellan has been draped on top of the topographic data. Bright areas are rough or have steep slopes. Dark areas are smooth. (NASA/JPL/ESA)

A group of science fiction authors and scientists have been discussing the idea on the blog Selenian Boondocks, which founder Jonathan Goff describes as “a blog I founded to discuss space politics, policy, technology, business, and space settlement.” One of the biggest problems with a lunar or Martian colony is that an astronaut’s bones and muscles deteriorate in low gravity. No one knows yet how much gravity a human needs to prevent deterioration, but Venus’s gravity is the closest to Earth’s, at about 9/10ths. Mars only has a third of the gravity that the Earth does, while the moon has a mere sixth.

Atmospheric pressure is also crucial. Think of the difference between jabbing a car tire and letting air out of a half-inflated balloon. Gases seek equilibrium. Since there’s barely any atmosphere on the moon or Mars, a rip in the hull of an enclosed human habitat would suck oxygen out at tremendous force. Thirty miles above Venus, it would merely seep out. This also means a Venutian cloud colony wouldn’t need as much reinforcement. Venus has other boons, too. Its rich atmosphere blocks radioactivity and could be mined for useful materials. And with a gentle temperature, far less energy would have to be spent on heating or cooling the colony.

Of course, it’s hard enough landing on the surface of another planet, let alone at 30 miles above the surface, but Landis hypothesized a way to do it.

A hypothetical floating outpost 30 miles above the surface of Venus. (Wikimedia Commons/Anynobody)

A sphere with titanium skin 0.04” thick would be able to survive reentry and float a couple of miles above the surface, he argued. Goff, who who describes himself as a space entrepreneur and space settlement advocate, suggests that rocket stages (the parts that drop off of a spaceship during liftoff) could also be engineered to float after use and be re-used, providing a way to and from the colony so that building materials could be mined from the surface. The well-informed space enthusiasts who frequent the Selenian Boondocks also helped Goff map out the chemical processes required to extract breathable air (a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen), water and various fuel and construction materials. 

After the chemical processes involved with producing life-supporting materials are demonstrated and perfected, the Selenian Boondocks team suggest small robotic labs could be sent to Venus, where they would bob in the atmosphere, extracting life-sustaining materials, gradually inflating great bladder-like structures (perhaps a Bigelow Aerospace module made of Kevlar). Years into the project, it might look like a gargantuan bunch of grapes. Permanent settlers could tether these floating blobs together, extending walkways and building platforms, creating something that might eventually look like a massive floating oil rig, complete with tubes dangling dozens of miles below to gather materials from the surface.

Goff plans to continue fleshing out the details on his site over the coming months (plans were temporarily put on hold after the birth of his youngest child). “I still need to talk about chemicals that seem easy to get to from the raw materials,” he says, “and how those impact colony design.”

As to what life perched high above Venus might really feel like, frequent Selenian Boondocks commentator George Turner imagines how a tough colonist might dangle meat into Venus’s ferocious, acidic atmosphere as a cooking source:

Well let me tell you, acid is good for meat, and breaks down connective tissue, fats, and tenderizes it. Run the pH the other way and it turns into soap and you might as well bite into a urinal cake.

Venus is not for the timid, or people too afraid to shove a fat bird out the airlock and let the harsh laws of thermodynamics do the work. Venus is for men. Men who like to eat meat – cooked in fire and acid and seasoned with the Devil’s own mix of volatiles boiled up from the pits of hell.

If the thought of Thanksgiving Dinner on Venus gives you the heebie jeebies, you don’t even need to think about plunging into the roiling atmosphere with nothing but a cheap plastic heat shield and a thin balloon to save you from the crematorium that yawns down below. So man up, dangle the bird into the depths of the Stygian hell, feast as someone who walks between worlds and lives on an airship that rides the hell born winds 30 miles above a surface so hot it glows visibly red.

Ultimately there will have to be a compelling reason to spend trillions of dollars to move off-world: a vital resource located on Venus, mass over-crowding, nuclear apocalypse. But if we do colonize the skies of Venus, it will be the soft factors like the plausibility of a Venutian acid-baked cuisine that will make us stay. 

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Can u post pics of earth 🌍

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The Blue Marble—Earth as seen by Apollo 17 in 1972

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Earth as seen by Apollo 11 astronauts at the beginning of the third day of TLC

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