Rendezvous with Mercury
Mercury, the small pock-marked planet closest to our sun, is, surprisingly, one of the least understood objects in our solar system.
It's difficult to see with a telescope or visit thanks to the big blazing ball of yellow in the sky.
But all this is about to change with the arrival of NASA's Messenger next year.
Before then, the spacecraft has been making a series of flybys before setting into orbit for a year taking holiday snaps.
One of these close encounters is taking place just about now (the photo above was taken by the probe) as scientists take repetitive scans through Mercury's comet-like anti-sunward tail.
The planet has a tail? Yep, the first rock from the sun has a glowing dragon tail of sodium atoms some 1.6-million miles long!
The atoms are thought to be blasted off the surface by the sun and micro-meteor impacts.
Here's some other surprising Weird Science Factoids about one of our closest neighbours.
Mercury is heavily cratered with regions of smooth plains, and has no substantial atmosphere.
The largest crater is Beethoven at 643 km in diameter and is the largest in the solar system.
Mercury orbits the sun in about 88 Earth days but takes 58 Earth days to rotate once. On this planet a year takes a (Mercury) day and a half!
Mercury may be seen as an evening "star" near where the sun has set, or as a morning "star" near where the sun will rise.
During the day, the average temperature on Mercury is 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the night, the average temperature is -300 degrees.
Mercury is primarily comprised of iron.
Before Messenger, Mercury has only been visited once by a spacecraft - Mariner 10 - in the 70s.
The probe could only photo half the planet, leaving the other half completely unmapped.
If you were to stand on Mercury, the Sun would appear two and a half times bigger than it appears on Earth.
Weird Science Factoid: The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar. Especially mine!
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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/28/mercury-tail.html
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/index.php
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
