Mercury Poster. Introduction The smallest planet in our solar system and nearest to the Sun, Mercury is only slightly larger than Earth's Moon. Namesake Namesake Mercury is appropriately named for the swiftest of the ancient Roman gods.
Potential for Life Potential for Life Mercury's environment is not conducive to life as we know it. A 3D model of Mercury, the innermost planet.
JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Full Moon Guide: October - November A new paper details how the hydrological cycle of the now-dry lake at Jezero Crater is more complicated than originally thought. This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 1. The lander cleared enough dust from one solar panel to keep its seismometer on through the summer, allowing scientists to study three big quakes.
Researchers will use Webb to observe 17 actively forming planetary systems. Scientists found evidence that an area on Mars called Arabia Terra had thousands of "super eruptions" over a million-year period.
Perseverance successfully collected its first pair of rock samples, and scientists already are gaining new insights into the region. Data received late Sept. The rover will abrade a rock this week, allowing scientists and engineers to decide whether that target would withstand its powerful drill. Drought is a complicated problem that requires lots of data. Satellites from NASA and its partners help collect that data. Drought Makes its Home on the Range. But if you subtract Venus's distance from Earth's, what you actually get is the average distance between their orbits - not the distance between the planets themselves.
Because the planets move at different speeds, they spend a bunch of time on opposite sides of the Sun. Because Mercury is closer to the Sun, the distance between it and Earth when they are at their farthest distance is much smaller than the distance between Earth and Venus. The team has devised the "point-circle method" or PCM equation for calculating the average distance between two planets in concentric, coplanar on the same orbital plane , circular orbits.
Stockman et al. According to their results, it's not just Earth. Mercury is actually, on average, the closest planet to all the other planets, too. If you want to learn more cool facts about the Solar System planets, here are our other space blog posts you might like:. How come Jupiter has a fuzzy core? How long is a day on the inner planets?
The ice giants and why they are so different. Rings around gas giants in the Solar System. Exploring planet Mercury. Any questions or comments? Let our Portable Planetarium team know! Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Design By: shinydgn. We discussed this question with our planetarium learners and they came up with the following reasoning: Look at the order of the planets. In , a rare transit of Mercury happened , where the planet crossed the face of the sun as seen from Earth. Mercury's transit may have yielded secrets about its thin atmosphere, assisted in the hunt for worlds around other stars, and helped NASA hone some of its instruments. When it arrived in March , it became the first spacecraft to orbit the planet.
The mission came to an abrupt end on April 30, , when the spacecraft, which had run out of fuel, purposely crashed onto the planet's surface for scientists to observe the results.
In , scientists discovered a group of meteorites in Morocco that they think could have originated from the planet Mercury. If so, it would make the rocky planet a member of a very select club with samples available on Earth; only the moon, Mars and the large asteroid Vesta have verified rocks in human laboratories. In , scientists released the first-ever global digital-elevation model of Mercury , which combined more than 10, images acquired by MESSENGER to take viewers across the wide-open spaces of the tiny world.
The model revealed the planet's highest and lowest points — the highest is found just south of Mercury's equator, sitting 2. In , a new Mercury explorer launched, the BepiColombo mission jointly operated by the European and Japanese space agencies. BepiColombo is composed of two spacecraft that, after a long trek to Mercury, will split up to better understand the tiny world. The European Space Agency's segment of the mission will focus on studying Mercury's surface while the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's portion will focus on the planet's strange magnetosphere.
Currently, the mission is trekking through the inner solar system, with Mercury flybys to fine-tune the spacecraft's mission beginning later this year. The proper science mission will begin in and is scheduled to last for about one Earth year, or four Mercury years.
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