Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system — only slightly larger than Earth's Moon. Mercury is the fastest planet in our solar system — traveling through space at nearly 29 miles 47 kilometers per second. The closer a planet is to the Sun, the faster it travels. Since Mercury is the fastest planet and has the shortest distance to travel around the Sun, it has the shortest year of all the planets in our solar system — 88 days.
Mercury is a rocky planet, also known as a terrestrial planet. Mercury has a solid, cratered surface, much like the Earth's moon. Mercury's thin atmosphere, or exosphere, is composed mostly of oxygen O2 , sodium Na , hydrogen H2 , helium He , and potassium K. It is unlikely that life as we know it could survive on Mercury due to solar radiation, and extreme temperatures.
Standing on Mercury's surface at its closest approach to the Sun, our star would appear more than three times larger than it does on Earth. The smallest planet in our solar system has a big presence in our collective imagination. Scores of science fiction writers have been inspired by Mercury, including Isaac Asimov, C. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C.
Clarke, and H. Television and film writers, too, have found the planet an ideal location for storytelling. Instead, it appears that Mercury's surface was still under formation as recently as 1. This is the alternative the researchers behind this study propose: The landscape was produced by the removal of upper crust volatiles, which are a class of chemical compound.
That means Mercury once had a thick, chemical-rich crust stretching a few kilometers deep. The study also suggests that this type of chaotic terrain is not exclusive to this region of Mercury, but rather that it may exist on a global scale. The findings challenge our idea of habitability, and beg the question: What life forms could exist on the most unlikely planet? But prior to this study, scientists may have dismissed an exoplanet similar to Mercury as potentially habitable if they should encounter one in a nearby solar system.
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August 4, Credit: Public Domain. Explore further. Source: Universe Today. Citation : How do we colonize Mercury? This document is subject to copyright.
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This is the first in Space. Check back each week for the next space destination. With its extreme temperature fluctuations, Mercury is not likely a planet that humans would ever want to colonize. But if we had the technology to survive on the planet closest to the sun, what would it be like to live there? To date, only two spacecraft have visited Mercury. The first, Mariner 10, conducted a series of Mercury flybys in , but the spacecraft only saw the lit half of the planet.
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