Mercury

Not even the hottest day at the hottest place on

Earth comes close to how hot it gets on Mercury.
Mercury is one of the nine planets in our solar
system. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun.

HOW HOT DOES IT GET ON MERCURY?

Daytime temperatures on Mercury can soar to 810°
Fahrenheit (430° Celsius). That is hot enough to melt
some metals! Mercury gets so hot because it is so close to
the Sun. Mercury is 36 million miles (58 million
kilometers) from the Sun, on average. Its distance from
the Sun changes somewhat throughout the year. Earth is
about three times farther from the Sun.

It really cools off at night on Mercury. The temperature

can drop as low as -290° Fahrenheit (-180° Celsius) after
the Sun goes down. So Mercury doesn’t just get hotter
than anywhere on Earth. It also gets colder! It gets so
cold partly because Mercury has almost no atmosphere.
An atmosphere is the gases around a planet. On Earth, the
gases act like a blanket that holds in heat. Another reason
it gets so cold is that Mercury turns slowly. On Mercury,
night lasts much longer than it does on Earth, and all the
heat leaks away into space.

TIME ON MERCURY
A day on Mercury is a long time. One Mercury day lasts
almost 59 days on Earth. One day is the time it takes for a
planet to spin once around its axis. An axis is an imaginary
line going through the center of a planet. Mercury turns
very slowly on its axis.
A year on Mercury, however, is pretty short. Mercury
moves fast around the Sun. It takes Earth 365 days to go
around the Sun, so a year on Earth is 365 days long. A
year on Mercury is only 88 Earth days. That’s the time it
takes Mercury to go around the Sun. Since Mercury’s year
is so short and its day is so long, the planet only has 3
days for every 2 years!

WHAT IS MERCURY MADE OF?

Mercury has a surface made of rocks. Some places on
Mercury are smooth. Some places have wrinkly ridges.

There are many big, round holes called craters on the

surface of Mercury. Meteors and comets crash into
Mercury and make the craters. Meteors are chunks of
stone and metal that fall from space. Comets are balls of
ice and rock. There is ice at the bottom of some deep
craters near Mercury’s north and south poles. Scientists
think the ice may have come from comets. Mercury has no
liquid water.

Scientists think that there must be a lot of iron metal

inside Mercury. They think this because Mercury is a giant
magnet. Earth is also a giant magnet. Earth is a magnet
because it has hot, liquid iron in its core. The liquid iron
spins and makes Earth a magnet. Scientists think the
same thing happens on Mercury. But Mercury is a weaker
magnet than Earth.

HOW DO WE LEARN ABOUT MERCURY?

Scientists do not know as much about Mercury as they do
about most of the other planets. It is hard to study
Mercury, because Mercury is hard to see.
Mercury is the second smallest planet, after Pluto. Its
diameter (the width of the planet) is 3,032 miles (4,879
kilometers). That is about the distance across the United
States. Mercury also orbits close to the Sun. The Sun is so
bright that its glare makes Mercury hard to see from
Earth. Special telescopes are needed to study Mercury.

Only one spacecraft has visited Mercury. Mariner 10 flew

past Mercury in 1974 and 1975. Mariner 10 took lots of
pictures. It measured Mercury’s temperature. Most of
what scientists know about Mercury came from Mariner
10.
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