Hi, I´m Mercury, first planet orbiting the sun.

You may know me from the sky above, even though it´s hard to catch me with the naked eye, because I´m so close to the sun. You can only see me for the period of a few days, alternating either at dusk or at dawn. Anyways, as my name might suggest, I´m NOT akin to the famous Freddy Mercury, even though I enjoy his music a lot.






In fact my titular saint is the Roman god Mercury: patron of financial gain, commerce, eloquence (and thus poetry), messages/communication, travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he is also the guide of souls to the underworld.
My Greek counterpart is Hermes.

I´m only 70 million kilometers away from the sun, which makes the temperature climb pretty high on my surface during daytime. It can get up to 420°C but in the night it can get as cold as -173,15°C.
That is F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G cold.

Because I´m the closest planet to the sun, I´m also the fastest orbiting it.
It takes me only 88 days to orbit the sun.
My rotation period is 58d 15h 30m.
The fast orbiting and the slow rotation result in a pretty long day, the time from sunrise to sunrise is 176 days.

If you take a fleetingly look at me, you might confuse me with the Earth's Moon. But I´m not a moon,
I´m a planet, because I´m orbiting the sun and not another planet. Talking about moons, I do not even have one. I´m all alone here getting roasted by the sun.
As you can see I´m pretty "small",
I´m only half the size of Earth.

And not only that, I´m also the least explored planet of the solar system. Reaching me from Earth poses significant technical challenges for you guys, because I orbit so much closer to the Sun than Earth does.
Only 2 space probes have visited me so far:
Mariner 10 in 1974/75 and Messenger 2008-2015
Both were NASA missions, and Messenger took much better pictures of course.
Here is a selection of them:

The colorful picture is a spectrum scan of my surface.

Of course we can also take a closer look at my surface.



Indeed my surface is similar in appearance to that of the Earth´s Moon. There are plenty of craters, mountains, plains and ditches.

If you want to see me with your own eyes, this will be possible again in July/August 2017
(picture is true for 48th degree of latitude)

source

Visit next time when we take a closer look at beautiful

V E N U S <3


L O V E

Other image sources: Messenger, surface