Mercury

This week in Science we each chose one planet to study, and decided that we were also to make our planet on a scale of 1cm =10,000 km. The planet I chose was mercury. I am so glad I chose this planet. 

It is closest to the sun and has a very interesting temperature range. Just before sunrise the temperature is about -183 degrees C, but by mid morning the temperature has risen up to 23 degrees C. Early afternoon it reaches it’s highest at 427 degrees C, but by midnight it goes down to -173 degrees C. But, this one day range I am talking about, happens over 58.6 earth days. This is because mercury spins just less than twice to fully orbit the sun. Since it is closer to the sun than earth, it only takes 87.9 earth days to orbit the sun. Which means that for every 2 orbits, three spins take place.

Mercury is also the smallest planet. Since Pluto got kicked out that is. Mercury is so small, that if you tools the planets surface area and flattened it out, it would be no bigger than some of the bigger continents that we have on earth today. And it’s core takes over 44% of its volume, whereas earth’s core only takes up about 16% of is volume. I was so glad we did this project. I was really interested in this topic, and loved hearing all about everybody else’s planets. I can’t wait to find out what we will have in store next!