Information About Planets


by Jeff Seward - Date: 2008-10-20 - Word Count: 665 Share This!

The world Mercury is the nearby to the Sun and is now the nominal world in our Solar System. The temperatures on Mercury extent from 700 degrees Kelvin on the sunlight segment to 90 degrees Kelvin on the night face. Mercury orbits the Sun once every 88 time and rotates on its axis once every 58 life. The orbit of Mercury is very elliptical and brings it as close to the Sun as 46 million kilometers and as far away from the Sun as 70 million kilometers. Since it is so close to the Sun, Mercury can only be seen from Earth during the early morning or sunset.

We can view Mercury from the Earth using both optical and radio telescopes, but much of what we understand Mercury is the effect of three fly bys performed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft during the 1970s. The Mariner 10 only photographed 40 to 45 percent of the shell of Mercury and the rest has never been seen up close. The photographs the Mariner 10 did convey back reveled an insecure, cratered outside related to the Earths own Moon.

Mercury is about 4878 kilometers in diameter and this makes Mercury faintly smaller than the moons Ganymede and Titan. However, Mercury is more than twice huge gratitude to its relatively high density that is back only to the Earths. This high density is the product of Mercurys middle building which has a relatively large iron sample that may be all or partly molten. The large iron extracted also generates a weak alluring domain about 1 percent as stark as the Earths. Despite being weak this alluring sphere allows Mercury to argue a very bony atmosphere in what is called the magnetosphere. The mesmeric tackle does this by deflecting the solar storm.

Up awaiting 1962 it was belived that Mercury rotated on its axis once each time it orbited the Sun. This would mean that one margin of Mercury would forever face the Sun the same way one face of Earths Moons always faces the Earth. Doppler radar observation conducted in 1965 showed this is not so. Mercury actually rotates on its axis three epoch during two of its orbits around the Sun. This has some sooner odd things especially when shared with Mercurys extremely elliptical orbit. If you were existence on Mercury you would see the Sun knoll and then grow better in extent. The Sun would then obstruct in its journey across the sky and rear its course. After back tracking the habits the Sun would then stop again and resume its original course. The Sun would then seem to shrink in magnitude and release below the horizon.

The orbit of Mercury gets even stranger as an answer of being to close to the Sun where the Suns gravitational sphere is incredibly fanatical. As Mercury orbits the Sun the direct where Mercury starts a new orbit moves faintly. This is called the precession of perihelion and it cannot be explained using Newtonian physics. For a while it was hypothesized that another globe, that was even named Vulcan, was exerting its gravitational wrench on Mercury and this was causing the precession of perihelion. This was proved deceitful and the existence of Vulcan was dismissed when Albert Einsteins General Theory of Relativity provided a better explanation.

At stage, Mercury is the least willful of the planets but that will soon change. On August 3, 2005 NASA launched a new mission to Mercury named MESSENGER which stands for Mercury Surface Space Environment geochemistry and Ranging. The MESSENGER spacecraft will make three fly bys of Mercury in January 2008, October 2008 and September 2009. The MESSENGER spacecraft would then drop into orbit around Mercury in March 2011. Japan and the European Space Agency are also planning a linkage mission to Mercury called BepiColombo which will come at Mercury in the year 2019. These spacecraft will use a make of scientific instruments to tell us more about all aspects of the world Mercury.

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