Why send a mission to Mercury? #shorts

By Dr. Becky

Community Score: 50% | 19.0K views | 6d

0 community ratings: null thumbs up, null thumbs down

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting at 40% of the distance from Earth to the Sun. That means it’s a lot warmer than Earth, reaching ~430°C during the day. But it’s got very little atmosphere, because it’s been so cooked by the Sun, meaning it gets down to -170°C at night. Giving it the biggest day/night temperature swing of any planet in the solar system. It also orbits the Sun faster than any other planet in the Solar System at 29 miles per second, with a year, or the time it takes to orbit the Sun being just 88 Earth days long. But its day, the time taken to spin on its axis, is more than double that taking 176 Earth days. For every 2 Mercury days that pass, three Mercury years pass in the same time frame. It’s also tiny, just sneaking in at 1/3 the width of Earth, but 80% of Mercury is made up of its dense iron core. Making it very different from all the other planets in the solar system, and we don’t know why. That’s just one of the many unexplained questions we

Tags: dr beccy, physiks, astronomie