The Surface of Mercury
Mercury is a barren lifeless planet, right up next to the sun.
This is a picture of Mercury taken by the Messenger space probe. The Messenger spacecraft was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, meaning it was the first to get these types of pictures. Messenger was part of NASA’s Discovery program, which was for lower-cost missions. Messenger had to include many new technologies to get within 46 million kilometers from the sun. At that distance the sun is up to 11 times brighter than it is here on Earth, and the surface temperature on Mercury can get up to 430 degrees celsius. [1][2][3]
Mercury is an interesting planet. Instead of an atmosphere Mercury has something called an exosphere. This exosphere is made up of particles blasted of its surface by solar wind and small space objects. Because of the pressure from the sun’s radiation the particles fly off the planet and form a tail behind it. Since the magnetic field is only one percent that of Earth’s it is unable to keep any particles from flying away.[3]
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[1] [[2]]9https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/messenger/indepth) [3]
Hi, good post.