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Mercury

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Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the solar system, orbiting the Sun once every 88 days. It ranges in brightness from about -2.0 to 5.

 


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MERCURY WEB LINKS/REFERENCES
Mercury from the
from the Jet Propulsion Lab.
Mercury at the web site " " ...

Mercury
Related Category: Astronomy: General
in astronomy, nearest planet to the sun, at a mean distance of 36 million mi (58 million km); its period of revolution is 88 days.

Mercury is a heavily cratered planet; its surface is similar to the surface of our Moon. Cratering on Mercury triggered volcanic eruptions that filled much of the surrounding area.

Mercury
The closest planet to the Sun.
Prior to 1965, astronomers believed that Mercury's sidereal rotation matched its orbital period of 88 days (synchronous rotation). This belief was reinforced by the chance coincidence of six 58.

Mercury is much too small for its gravity to retain any significant atmosphere over long periods of time, but it does have a very tenuous atmosphere containing hydrogen, helium, oxygen, sodium, calcium and potassium.

Mercury's orbit is highly eccentric; at perihelion it is only 46 million km from the Sun but at aphelion it is 70 million. The position of the perihelion precesses around the Sun at a very slow rate.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun
Mercury is the innermost planet in our solar system. Because of its small size - a diameter of 3030 miles - it is not the easiest of planets to observe.

Mercury
A mosaic of images of Mercury taken by the Mariner 10 mission. Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. With a diameter of 4880 km, it is the second smallest.

Mercury Map Images
Mercury Photo/Animation Gallery
Mercury was named by the Romans after the fleet-footed messenger of the gods because it seemed to move more quickly than any other planet.

Mercury, a planet that's often lost in the glare of the Sun, tantalizes sky watchers this December. That's because Mercury swings to the eastern edge of its orbit as seen from Earth, staying out in the evening sky for an elongated amount of time.

Mercury means:
In astronomy mythology,Mercury was the Roman version of the god Hermes. He was the messenger for the other gods, and for this reason Mercury is often depicted in pictures with winged sandals.

Mercury's orbital period is just shy of 88 days, but its rotation around its axis was for a long time a mystery: sometimes its surface markings (to the extent telescopes managed to resolve this small planet) repeated in a way suggesting that, ...

mercury, and it's position in the sky at birth is used in astrology to describe thought processes. mercury symbolizes: ...

Mercury
Mean Distance from the Sun
0.39 AU (57.91 million km / 35.35 million miles) ...

From Mercury, the Sun appears two and a half times larger than it does on Earth. The sky would appear black because there's little atmospheric scattering of light.

Definition: Mercury: Closest planet to the sun. Named for the Roman god of trade a profit.
Space Tragedies9 Planets in Nine DaysAstronomy 101
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Mercury is only about one-third the size of the Earth. It is smaller than any other planet. Mercury is very close to the Sun and has no substantial atmosphere.

Mercury has played an important role in the development and testing of theories of the nature of gravity because its elliptical, ...

Mercury (planet)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the solar system, orbiting the Sun once every 88 days. It ranges in brightness from about âˆ'2.0 to 5.

Mercury At a Glance
Discovery Known since antiquity Name Roman messenger god Average Distance from Sun 35,983,095 miles 57,909,175 km 0.387 Astronomical Unit Mass 0.055 times Earth's mass Equatorial Diameter 3,032 miles 4,879 km Length of Day 58.

Mercury is not a good place for a vacation. Searing hot in the day, and frigid cold at night, any future human outposts on Mercury would likely be bathed in eternal twilight.

Mercury Close Up
The small, bright halo (center) is 10 km (6 mi) in diameter. The prominent crater further left, which has a central peak, is 30 km (19 mi) across. The darker, lightly cratered area (upper left) may be an ancient lava flow.

MESSENGER's path to Mercury
These animations show how NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft will get to Mercury.
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Freddie Mercury , was a United Kingdom singer-songwriter, pianist, guitarist and co-founder of the Rock music Musical ensemble Queen . As a performer, he was known for his vocal prowess and flamboyant performances....

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, so the Sun's gravity attracts it the most. As a result, Mercury orbits around the Sun faster than any other planet. Mercury orbits the Sun in about 88 days.

Mercury is the first planet in the solar system, first terrestrial planet, and closest planet to the Sun. Mercury is named after the Roman winged messenger of the gods. It is the second smallest, a bit bigger than our moon.

MERCURY
MERCURY, in the solar system, the planet closest to the sun. Its mean distance from the sun is approximately 58 million km (about 36 million mi); its diameter is 4875 km (3030 mi); its volume and mass are about 1/18 that of the earth; ...

Mercury: Because the day is exactly two years long (due to orbital resonance), the method of plotting the sun's position at the same time each day would only yield a single point.

Mercury lacks an atmosphere to speak of. Even though most of its surface is very hot, there is strong evidence that water ice exists in locations near its north and south poles which are kept permanently-shaded by crater walls.

MERCURY will rise almost 2 hours before the Sun at the beginning of March and be quite easy to spot in the morning twilight. It will be about 12° up about 45 minutes before sunrise, a little to the south of east.

Mercury
Image above: Mercury is hot and cold. Credit: NASA
Running Hot and Cold ...

Mercury is a bit surprising because it has a weak magnetic field. Mercury is the smallest of the terrestrial planets, so its interior should have cooled off long ago. Also, Mercury spins slowly---once every 58.8 days.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have been known for a very long time...but no one knows when they were first seen. Being such bright objects in the sky, they have been known and observed by ancient civilizations.

Mercury: Not visible
Venus: Southwest at dusk
Mars: Found in the constellation Ophiuchus (early January) and Sagittarius (late January)
Jupiter: Found in the constellation Ophiuchus
Saturn: Found in the constellation Leo ...

Mercury
The closest planet to the Sun. The temperature range on Mercury's surface is the most extreme in the solar system, ranging from about 400° C (750° F) during the day to about -200° C (-300° F) at night.

MERCURY - Astronomy
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Mercury: The closest planet to the sun.
Meteorites: Small pieces of rock that enter our atmosphere and gradually disintegrate, before reaching the ground.

MERCURY
Mercury is the planet closest to the sun. It a small, dense, rocky planet with almost no atmosphere.
MERIDIAN
The meridian is an imaginary north-south line in the sky that passes through the observer's zenith.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
theories - (n.)
Detailed explanations of the behavior of matter based on experiments; may be revised if new data warrant.

Mercury-Cadmium-Telluride (HgCdTe) -- A semiconductor alloy useful as an infrared photoelectric detector. Also known as CMT (Cad-Mer-Tel) [McL97] Mercury ...

Near Mercury
The U.S. Mariner 10 probe transmits the first image of Mercury.
1975 A.D.

[12.3] MERCURY, ZINC-AIR, & SILVER OXIDE BUTTON CELLS
[12.4] LEAD-ACID, EDISON, NICAD, & NIMH CELLS
[12.5] LITHIUM TECHNOLOGY ...

July 8 - Mercury at Greatest Eastern Elongation. The planet Mercury attains its greatest angular separation from the Sun and will be visible low in the western sky at dusk.

1961
Original Mercury Astronauts Selected,
The Evolution of Manned Spacecraft (1961-1981),
First American,Alan Shepard, launched into space, May 5, 1961 ...

The rotation of Mercury, which makes three complete rotations on its axis for every two complete orbits around the Sun.
A ring ...

manometric equivalent (NASA SP-7, 1965) The length in millimeters of a vertical column of a given liquid at standard room temperature equivalent to 1 millimeter of mercury at 0° C. manures (NASA Thesaurus) Materials that fertilize land.

On the other hand the enigmatical motion of the perihelion of Mercury has not yet found any plausible explanation except on the hypothesis that the gravitation of the sun diminishes at a rate slightly greater than that of the inverse square - the ...

Gienah's odd chemical composition separates it from the more ordinary "blue giants," the star a member of the class of "mercury- manganese" stars, the brightest of which is Alpheratz in Andromeda.

1761 - Joseph-Nicolas Delisle 62 observing station network for observing transit of Venus (& Mercury)
1769 - Short reflectors used at 63 station network for transit of Venus
1840 - J.W.

Darker regions show greater concentrations of mercury on the surface of Alpheratz. The mercury clouds tend to concentrate along the equator, probably due to the star's rotation. Credit: Kochukhov et al./Nature) ...

But five unusually bright stars - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn behaved differently. Within a single night they would remain in a fixed position relative to the other stars.

The famous astronomer Sir Edmund Halley of cometary fame suggested observing Mercury or Venus as they passed directly in front of the Sun. (Such passages are called transits and they are not common.

One for sunlight, one for yellow (incandescent) light and one for blue (mercury vapor) light. To get the proper color, I use the sunlight setting of my camera.

It explained in a natural way why Mercury and Venus stayed close to the sun. The Ptomelaic system had been required to link the motions of these planets to the sun in an artificial way (i.e., different from the other planets) to fit this behavior.

inferior conjuction when an inferior planet passes between the Sun and the Earth so that they are lined up in the order Sun, inferior planet, Earth inferior planet a planet whose orbit is inside the Earth's orbit around the Sun: Mercury and Venus
L ...

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and only a bit smaller than Mars. The infrared images of Titan's surface show a bright area which is a surface feature that is about 2,500 miles across (about the size of Australia).

31 AU for Mercury, the innermost planet. By contrast, Phaethon’s aphelion distance of 2.4 AU is in the main asteroid belt.

The four inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, which are the four terrestrial planets of the Solar System, have similar compositions of iron, nickel, silicon, and other elements with high melting temperatures.

Ptolemy believed the planets and Sun to orbit the Earth in the order Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

See also: Earth, Planet, Sun, Solar, Orbit