How many months or even years roughly would it take to get to mercury from earth?

Question

Also if you really really want to help, what is the gravity like on mercury? And what's the surface mass, and what does that mean?

Answer 1

Please capitalize Mercury and Earth, they are proper nouns, just like London and Mexico.

It took three days for the Apollo spacecraft to get to the moon, and that's only a quarter of a million miles away. Mercury is 90 million miles away, which is 360 times as far. Instead of 3 days, it would take 3 years, at that same speed.

Mariner 10 was a space probe which went to Mercury. It was launched on Nov 3, 1973. It reached Mercury on March 29, 1974, only 4 1/2 months later, but it wasn't carrying any passengers.

It might be possible to get there in less than 2 months if you had a really fast spaceship.

Just for fun, let's imagine that there's a bridge from Earth to Mars and you can drive there in your car. At 60 miles per hour (about 100 kph) it would take 1.5 million hours, which is over 170 years! And that's assuming that you drove 24 hours a day, never stopping to sleep or even use the bathroom.


I don't know what you mean by "surface mass". The mass of Mercury is 3.3x10^23 kg, which is about 1/18th the mass of Earth. The surface gravity on Mercury is 3.7 m/s2, compared to 9.8 m/s2 on Earth, so that's a little less than half.

Answer 2

It depends on how fast you go. The messenger space craft was launched August 2004 and will fly by Mercury 3 times in 2008 and 2009 before entering orbit in March, 2011. The long flight is because it is using several gravity assist maneuvers to conserve fuel. Strange as it seems, it takes much more rocket power to go to Mercury than it does to get to Mars or even Jupiter. The reason is a little hard to understand for people not trained in orbital mechanics, but has to do with the terrific centrifugal force of its fast orbit so close to the Sun. If there was a powerful enough rocket to send it directly there without any gravity assist maneuvers then it could get there in only about 3 months.

Answer 3

Probes to Mercury have taken anywhere from 6 months to a year to get to Mercury (depending on the trajectory chosen and therefore the distance travelled).

Mercury's surface gravity is .38 times that on Earth.

Surface mass - no such astronomical term.
There is surface area (how much land is there): Mercury has 0.108 the surface area of the Earth
And there is mass (how much material in the entire object): Mercury has about 0.055 Earth's mass.

Answer 4

It took 5 months for the first and the only satellite to fly past mercury.