Planet mercury was named after the roman god of commerce, travel and thievery. This is the first planet in our solar system. Mercury is also the second smallest planet in our system. It is so small that if earth was of the size of baseball than mercury was the size of golf ball, means much smaller. The space from mercury looks different from our earth because of its size. The sun looks three times bigger from mercury as it looks from earth. Mercury is even smaller in size than the moon titan of our solar system.
1. Closest and fastest
Mercury is the closest to sun and also the fastest in speed while orbiting the sun. Mercury’s orbit is not circular but elliptic. It goes as near to sun as 47 million km and as far as 70 million km from sun during it’s orbiting. It travels at the speed of 50 km per second.
2. Its existence
Its existence was known in third century BC. The Greeks gave it two names, Apollo when it appeared as morning star and Hermes when it appeared as evening star.
3. Surface
Surface of mercury resembles earth’s surface. It is rocky and have thousands of craters formed due to the impact of collision of meteorites. It was plain smooth surface and miles high mountains.
4. The iron core
Mercury has the iron core which is partially molten. Its core’s radius is 1800 to 1900 km; almost the size of earth’s moon and its mental is only 500 to 600 km thick. The total core makes 75% area of the mercury.
5. Atmosphere
Mercury’s atmosphere is constantly on the change due to the extreme heat which lets its surface atoms escape to the space. Its atmosphere, that’s why, is thin.
6. Temperature
Its weather conditions are extreme holy. The temperature varies from 90k to 700k.
7. No moon
Mercury has no moon and no known satellite that orbits it. There may be some, but to date none is discovered.
8. Mercury’s day
Mercury orbits sun in elliptic orbit and it complete three rotations in every two orbits. Therefore, for a day on mercury makes 176 earth days.
9. Caloris basin
This is the most prominent feature of planet mercury and formed when a huge asteroid stroke mercury at the time of its birth. It took mercury half billion years from its birth to stabilize its geological changes.
10. Least explored
Mercury is the least explored planet of our system. it was only once explored in 1974-75 when it was discovered that the magnetic force on mercury is weaker than that of earth.