Mercury is one of the most hostile worlds in the solar system's family of planets, and this is because it is located so close to the fiery cosmic furnace - the sun
The planet Mercury is one of the most hostile worlds in the family of planets of the solar system and this is because it is located so close to the fiery cosmic furnace - the sun. On top of that this planet is so small that it can't even hold its own atmosphere. The combination of these two factors makes conditions unbearable on this planet, especially for non-serious tourists.
During the day the temperature reaches up to 350 degrees Celsius while at night it drops to 140 degrees below zero. The rotation of the planet around its axis is very slow: one rotation of Hema takes 58.65 days in terms of the Earth's orbit, while the speed of Hema's movement around the Sun is great: a year on the planet is equal to our 87.97 days. So it turns out that the planet Hema completes only 1.5 revolutions around itself while it orbits the sun, therefore the solar day on Mercury is our 176 days.
At the poles of the planet - the temperature difference is smaller.
Scientists claim that there are craters at the poles that sunlight never reaches, and you can even find frozen water there.
The only spacecraft that studied Mercury so far was Mariner 10 which, during three close flybys it made in 1974 and 1975, surveyed about 45% of its surface. Mariner 10 nimbly maneuvered to image a portion of the illuminated hemisphere during each flyby, passing behind the planet and continuing to image the sunward side as the spacecraft moved away. Its highest resolution images captured objects as large as one and a half kilometers. Processing of the information from Mariner 10 produced the dramatic mosaic image seen here. Like Earth's moon, the surface of Hema (Mercury) is scarred by collisions. The smooth stripe The vertical visible on the upper right represents areas for which there was no information to build the image.
