What does Mercury weigh?
Mercury doesn’t weigh anything at all – it’s in a state of freefall around the Sun (which we more commonly call ‘Orbiting’), so that it’s as weightless as an astronaut orbiting the Earth. It’s mass, however is 3.3 x 1023 kg (or three hundred and thirty million trillion tonnes!) – that’s a number so big that even economists can’t understand it, and yet it’s still the smallest planet in the Solar System by a long way.
Written by Allen Versfeld
Comments? Questions? Why not mail me at uastronomer@gmail.com