The Solar System

Mercury: Hermes the Messenger

Mercury Profile Size 15% the size of Earth & 1/200 the mass of Earth. Smallest in our solar system. Distance from the sun 28.5 million miles from the sun.

Tell me about it! Has an atmosphere, but it is called an exosphere. It it created by the solar winds blasting off chemicals and letting them tail spin around the planet. The planet is made of mostly a metallic inside.

Mercury is probably a big metal ball covered by a rocky crust. The core (which is the big metal ball) is made of nickel and iron - just like the Earth. Scientists think that part of this core is liquid, since Mercury has a fairly strong magnetic field.

The Heat Temperatures Lowest (-283 degrees F) Highest (+801 degrees F) How can that be? Even though Earth is further from the sun, our atmosphere traps the heat in. Without that, we would freeze to death every night. Since Mercury doesn’t have any atmosphere worth mentioning, no heat remains, therefore you get high heats, and low freezes.

By the way, Mercury is NOT the hottest planet - even though it's the closest to the Sun! Venus totally  beats it.

The Orbit Every 88 Earth days, Mercury orbits the Sun. However, the planet itself rotates once every 1,407 hours. That’s almost 2 months. (58 days) A year on Mercury is about a day and a half long. What would be the strangest things we would experience with a year being only a day and a half long?

Sweet Dreams Imagine, after about ¾ days, you would have to quickly run to the frozen side of the planet because if you didn’t, you might wake up to a blaze of heat coming directly at you.

Can we Live on Mercury? No, you can't live on Mercury. First of all, there's no water and no air to breathe - not even poisonous air.  Mercury is missing an atmosphere. (because it's just not massive enough to have a gravity strong enough to hold gasses close to it.

When can we see it? Only 13 times in a century will you be able to get a good look at Mercury because of the light from the sun blocking it out. The next time will be May 9th 2016.

Ice on Mercury? Again, the answer is yes. There is ice on Mercury. In some of Mercury’s shade blocked craters, there are patches of ice that are lingering below, just waiting for something to throw off the planet to be boiled out into the light exosphere.

Basic Facts No natural satellites. (Moons) This is because it is too close to the Sun. The Sun is so huge (massive) that its strong gravity would suck a moon away in a second! If you weighed 100 pounds on Earth, then on Mercury you would only weigh 38 pounds because of it’s low gravity. Pretty neat, huh.

Your Assignment Individually…no talking, I want you to write down all the things that would happen from the intense sun. For Example: We could get a tan in about 3 seconds…along with burns, but hey, that’s the price of beauty. When you have finished, I want you to turn it into a paper airplane. We will fly them to the center of the room and read some of the possible responses. (5 minutes to write)…GO!