The innermost planet in the Solar System is a dense, heavily cratered world that takes about 59 Earth days to fully rotate on its own axis as it travels on its 88-day journey around the Sun.
It is possible to see Mercury from the Earth without a telescope or binoculars though its closeness to the Sun's bright light can make it difficult to spot.
Photographed and studied at close range by the Mariner 10 and Messenger probes, Mercury is blasted by solar radiation and is not thought to be a likely place for life to flourish.
Find out more about the other planets in the Solar System
Photo: Mercury taken by the Messenger probe (NASA/JHU Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution)
If Jupiter were much larger it would be a star in its own right! Enjoy Astronomer Marek Kukula's eloquent guide to the Sun, the planets and the outer reaches of the Solar System.
Here’s an animated guide to remembering all the planets of the Solar System in order, using an easy mnemonic trick.
Tortured Mercury suffers the biggest temperature swings of all the planets.
Professor Brian Cox looks at Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System, and explains why it lost its atmosphere.
Sir Patrick Moore describes how Percival Lowell mapped Mercury. Though he recognises that Lowell made many contributions to astronomy, Sir Patrick notes that his maps of other planets were not accurate.
In a 14 January 2008 BBC News report, science correspondent Christine McGourty reports on Messenger's mission at Mercury as the spacecraft prepares for its first flyby of the innermost planet in the Solar System. She speaks with Alison Boyle from London's Science Museum.
Mercury is the innermost of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the smallest, and its orbit has the highest eccentricity of the eight.[a] It orbits the Sun once in about 88 Earth days, completing three rotations about its axis for every two orbits. Mercury has the smallest axial tilt of the Solar System planets. The perihelion of Mercury's orbit precesses around the Sun at an excess of 43 arcseconds per century beyond what is predicted by Newtonian mechanics, a phenomenon that was explained in the 20th century by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Mercury, being an inferior planet, appears as a morning star and an evening star, but is much more difficult to see than the other inferior planet, Venus. At its brightest, Mercury is technically a very bright object when viewed from Earth, but it is not easily seen in practice because of its proximity in the sky to the Sun.
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