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The cratered surface of Mercury (Image map courtsey of NASA).
Mercury
is the closest planet to Sol. This, coupled to the fact that its
atmosphere is extremely thin means that surface temperatures soar
massively during the day, but they also plummet massively during the
planet's long night. Mercury is not as hot as Venus, but experiences
greater temperature fluctuations.
Planet type: terrestrial, hot cratered
rocky desert planet.
Equatorial
Diameter:
2440 km (0.3829 Earth radii).
Mass: 0.055 Earth masses.
Surface
gravity:
0.38 g.
Orbit: Mercury orbits Sol at
0.307 - 0.467 astronomical units with a year lasting 87.97 Earth
days and a day length of 58 days and 15.5 hours.
Atmosphere: extremely thin (trace)
composition by volume - 42% oxygen (O2), 29% Na, 22%
hydrogen, 6% He, 0.5% K and traces of inert gases.
Surface
Temperature:
highly variable! Night-time temperatures: -173 to -193 degrees C,
daytime temperatures of up to 427 degrees C; mean surface
temperature = -73 degrees C near the equator.
Magnetic
Field:
weak - 1.1% the strength of earth's and also a magnetic dipole,
strong enough to generate a magnetosphere.
Life: none as yet discovered,
deemed extremely unlikely: the planet is probably sterile. The
surface is too dry and blasted by ultraviolet rays.
Key
Tourist Attractions
Mercury
is a good place to go to observe craters. The
craters display several types of morphology. Smaller meteorites
(10 000 to 100 000 tonnes) produce simple circular craters.
Complex craters are between 20 and 150 km diameter and are formed
by meteorites ranging between 1 and 100 billion tonnes. Recoil
forms a central
peak
inside the plain of a complex crater. These craters are surrounded
by a ring of radial debris which has rained down around the impact
site. The very largest craters, basins, have
one
to several central rings
instead of a central peak on the crater plain, e.g. The Strindberg
basin (165 km diameter). In the formation of these impact basins,
the debris rained down to produce radiating chains of
secondary impact craters. Radiating
rays
of ejected material, several hundred kilometres long, frequently
form around these craters.
Long ridges or 'wrinkles' in the planet's crust extend for
hundreds of kilometres and possibly formed when the core and
mantle cooled and contracted after the crust had already
solidified.
Above: a model of Mercury's internal structure. Beneath the relatively thick crust (100-300 km) is thought to occur a 500 to 700 km deep mantle of silicates. Mercury has a density similar to that of the earth but being much smaller its internal pressures are much lower. One way of accounting for this is to incorporate a relatively large molten and iron-rich core, making up 42% of the planet's volume and rich in silicates. This suggests that either mercury was at one time a much larger planet, or that it failed to accrete lighter materials due to the density of the condensing pre-solar nebula and perhaps high protostellar winds surrounding the forming Sun. The abundance of volatile materials on the surface, such as potassium and sodium, suggests that it is unlikely that heat vaporised away the outer layers.
Article
created:
5th Sept 2015
Article updated:
6th sept 2015
Click images to enlarge
Above: the Debussy crater (lower right) is a prominent feature of Mercury with radiating ejecta rays. The solar winds blacken ejecta rays, causing them to fade over about one billion years. Bright rays is therefore an indication of geological youth. Crater density can also help reveal the age of a surface. Older surfaces have statistically more craters, whereas renewal of a surface, such as by volcanism, obliterates craters so that youthful surfaces are smoother and less cratered.
Mercury's
Anomalous Orbit
Although
Mercury is itself very round and a near-perfect sphere, its orbit is
very elongated and ellipsoidal (eccentric). Its day-length (rotation
period) is also precisely two-thirds as long as its year (revolution
period). This is due to tidal forces with the Sun, prevalent as
mercury orbits so close, slowing down the rotation of mercury,
resulting in its long day of 58 earth days and 15.5
hours. The two-thirds ratio is predicted to be stable (another
stable configuration is tidal-locking in which a body keeps the same
face towards its central star or planet, in which case its rotation
period equals its revolution period).
As is typical of elliptical orbits in planetary systems, the pull of
the other planets perturbs mercury's orbit and its orbit slowly
precesses (the ellipse rotates around the Sun so that the planet
does not come back to exactly where it started through one complete
orbit). Newtonian mechanics fails to accurately predict the rate of
precession, instead Einstein's theory of General Relativity has to be used to give a
much more exact prediction. This is because Mercury is so close to
the Sun that the spacetime it occupies is greatly warped by the
energy-density of the Sun. This is one piece of evidence in favour
of the validity of General Relativity.