What They Didn't Teach You at School about Planet Mercury | NASA's MESSENGER Discoveries

Thank you for giving credit to Chen-Wan Yen. She doesn't even have a page on Wikipedia yet made the exploration of Mercury possible.

Messenger is one of my all-time favorites, because of how magnificent and audacious its flight plan was. You can't get there without including relativistic effects, so the fact that the plan went almost perfectly is proof of the value of the rigor of science.

One point I'd like to add: The reason why Jupiter has been visited by so many spacecraft compared to Mercury is because of its use as a gravitational slingshot. Ulysses, Cassini, and New Horizons all did not have Jupiter as a primary target, but only for a gravity assist.

"Every single one of us is in this picture." I loved seeing the human race's most recent family photo. :-)

The MOST interesting thing about Mercury that you forgot to mention is the Charged Particle display on the Mercurian nightside. A constant rain of glowing charged particles from the sun can be seen as a psychadelic display from the nightside at surface level as they streak around the Mercurian magnetospheric bowshock to go trailing away from the nightside. To an observer on the nightside surface, this would be a mindbending sight

It's amazing how much an atmosphere impacts overall temp. You'd think being so close to the sun the surface its self would get so hot it'd retain heat on the dark side. But it doesn't, in fact it seems to immediately lose the heat. It baffles my mind to think about those extremes switching so fast

I was told in school that mercury was tidally locked which is what they knew at the time I guess. Thanks for clearing that up.

Astrum doing ~50min on Mercury? Yes please ❤

What a wonderful story. The amount of research and planning to make such a magnificent informative video like this must have been massive. I have never seen such depth of information in any video I have ever seen. You are now a Master of Documentary....thank you so much

I clicked on the video just to have some background noise, but I ended up stopping everything i was doing to really watch and listen and now craving for more. Really well pieced together. +1 subscriber.

That's tremendous, I have always felt compelled to pursue knowledge and power in order to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Been seeking a means to be influential and find out more knowledge about the human race and about the things not everyone is destined to know. I wish to fulfill the goal of enlightenment passed down by our forebears.

It sounds silly, but I feel sad for the probe that crashed into Mercury. It's got to be hard for NASA to say goodbye to their "kids" like that. I know people must get attached to them if I can just hearing about its journey.

Getting a feature length documentary on Mercury is fantastic beyond words. Thank you for this! That orbital trajectory of Messenger just blows my mind. Humans are awesome!

This is the best planetary documentaries I have ever seen,

I did a lot of welding when I was younger, and I got to say, looking at mercury the scaring on its surface reminds me of electrical arcing.

They did 't teach me anything about Mercury in school.

2:02 Earth's bulk composition is almost exactly the same as mars, that is if you took the planets apart seperated them into the elements and shaped them into convenient ingots the number of iron ingots, silicon, aluminum ect. Would be pretty much the same just that mars would have 1/10th as many of each, earth is more dense due to it's material being more compressed due to the greater pressure that its material exerts. If you make Mercury earth sized it would rapidly contract by 20-30% as the iron in its core was forced into a smaller volume and if you used Mercury density material to make a planet as big as earth the amount of mass would be significantly more than Earth's mass. Either scenario would result in a planet with much stronger surface gravity than earth.

I am so happy to hear information about Mercury on YouTube, Always have a interest in the Solar System.

I wasn't taught anything about Mercury in school. I learned it by reading textbooks in libraries starting when I was nine years old.

All my homies love drinkin mercury