On March 18, 2011, NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft entered into an orbit around the planet Mercury. This is another first for the human race! No other man-made machine has ever pulled off this gravitational balancing act!
Planet Earth is the third planet closes to the sun. Using the old saying, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas,” it can be remembered that the order of the planets goes like this: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (if you consider it to be a planet). Accordingly, it would seem as though either Venus or Mars would be the closes planet to Earth. But which is it?
Mercury is the first planet and I would say the planet that is most often ignored. Is it because it looks like the Moon? Are we only interested in planets with atmospheres (like Venus or Saturn) rather than rocky objects littered with hundreds of thousands of craters?