Mercury
Floating in Space • 22m
Visit Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet in the Solar System. Its orbit around the Sun takes 87.97 days, the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System. Named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger of the gods, Mercury has 'mercurial' temperature swings from extreme heat to extreme cold in the space of a day. It is close to the Sun's heat, but has no atmosphere to keep it in the darkness of space. Ancient meteorites found on Earth, called Aubrites, are believed to have originally formed in an ocean of magma on Mercury. Music by KRON.
Up Next in Floating in Space
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Venus
Visit the second planet from the Sun, and our celestial neighbor. Venus is a world of extremes, where scorching heat and a toxic atmosphere reign supreme. The planet spins so slowly that a Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year. Its surface, adorned with thousands of volcanic peaks, is an in...
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Earth
Home! Earth, the 3d planet from the Sun, formed 4.5 bya and weighs 6.58 billion trillion tons. Earth is not a perfect sphere, but an oblate spheroid, “squashed” a little at the North and South poles. The equatorial diameter is about 7,926 miles, but the polar diameter is 7,899.86 miles. Earth’s s...
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Mars
Visit Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after Mercury. In English, Mars carries the name of the Roman god of war and is often referred to as the 'Red Planet'. The latter refers to the effect of the iron oxide prevalent on Mars' surface, which ...
