Mercury Facts – Interesting Facts About Mercury

Fun Facts About Mercury

Mercury has the biggest man-made crater in space. NASA’s Messenger ran out of fuel in 2014 after orbiting the planet for 6 years. It got closer to the planet and much faster resulting in a crater of over 50 ft wide.

Mercury like Venus and Moon displays complete range of phases as it moves around the orbit relative to Earth.

As Mercury’s atmosphere contains a lot of ions of magnesium, calcium and sodium it smells like wet, metallic burps of the bottom.

Mariner 10 visited Mercury in 1975 and Messenger in 2011.

BepiColombo, the next spacecraft that is going to be sent to Mercury. Its scheduled departure is in 2017 and will arrive by January 2024.

From Mercury, the sun is two and half times bigger than it appears on Earth.

Mercury is observed to be having different magnetic fields at its poles.

For every seven years or so, Mercury can be seen from Earth as it passes across the face of the sun. It recently took place on May 9, 2016.

It was once believed that Vulcan, a planet existed between Sun and Mercury.

Mercury’s outer shell is only 500-600 kilometers thick.