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Mercury (Planet): Solar System
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The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun within the solar system. Mercury was named by the Romans after their god of the same name. Due to its small angular separation from the Sun, which it orbits every 88 days, Mercury is not easily seen from Earth.
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Renewed interest in Mercury stems from recent progress in understanding the evolution of the solar system. Because Mercury represents a kind of extreme among the terrestrial planets, it offers special insights into the formation and early history of planets in the inner solar system, especially when compared to other rocky planetary bodies.
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In Arthur C. Clarke 's novel Rendezvous with Rama ( 1973 ), Mercury is ruled by a hot-tempered government of metal miners that tries to destroy the alien spacecraft Rama. The novel shares its background of a colonised Solar System with several others, especially Imperial Earth .
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Mercury is the second smallest planet in the solar system (only Pluto is smaller). Mercury's diameter is about 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers), yet it has just 5.5 percent of Earth's mass. (Earth's diameter is about 7,900 miles [12,720 kilometers].) On average, Mercury is 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from the Sun. The Sun's intense gravitational field tilts Mercury's orbit and stretches it into a long ellipse (oval).
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Spectroscopic studies indicate that only an extremely thin atmosphere, containing sodium and potassium, exists on Mercury, its atoms apparently diffusing from the crust of the planet. Collisions with other newly forming planets early in the history of the solar system may have stripped away lighter materials, thereby accounting for Mercury’s relatively high density. The force of gravity on the planet’s surface is about one third of that on the Earth’s surface.
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