Life

I don't believe there is any life on planet Mercury. It is far too close to the sun for water to stay in a liquid state and for any known living organism to survive. Although recently, water has been discovered on the bottoms of craters and in the poles of mercury. It is not in a liquid state, it is ice. Mercury has a modest magnetic field that is approximately aligned with the planet's axis of rotation. The field is a planetary dipole, and is thought to be generated in a manner similar to the way the Earth is though to generate its magnetic field - dynamo action at or around the core. It doesn't really have much of an atmosphere because its gravity is too weak to keep one. However it does have a very unstable one containing hydrogen, helium, oxygen, sodium, calcium and potassium.



Advanced life forms as we know them require liquid water. Since the mid 1960's, we've known about the presence of frozen water at the Martian poles. There is liquid water on Mars, however, it has never been proven. Until liquid water is found on the Red Planet, the odds of any life forms or microbes abiding on Mars is extremely remote. Mars is located in between Earth and Jupiter. I believe that there is frozen water on Mars, and that there is maybe a living organism on Mars, just maybe. Mars is pretty barren though, and seems like the frozen water is hard to get a hold of. I don't think there is life there now, but maybe in a few thousand years, there might be.

Distance Blog Post

Space is measured by km, AU, and ly. AU is the distance from the sun to the Earth and is used to measure the distance between planets and other masses in the solar system. As for kilometer, which is used to measure smaller things on Earth mostly. A ly (light year), is the distance light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More precisely, one light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers. We use light years to measure objects in our universe much much farther away than anything we can imagine if we measure the distance with anything but a light year.

The distance from Mercury to the Earth varies as both the planets orbit the Sun. When closest to the Sun, Mercury is about 77 million kilometers from the Earth. When its the farthest, it's about 222 million kilometers. It would take about 61/2 years with the speeds we can reach today. Humans have never traveled to Mercury. I doubt they ever will until technology is greatly improved and we can build a space shuttle that can withstand such heat and is light enough to lift off of Earth.