A fighter pilot is one of those elite men who has been selected to fly sleek, sexy, supersonic aircraft in dazzling aerial combat, as well as put on cool airshows and pose for photographs. Only the best pilots in the world get to be fighter pilots. The rest fly slow, heavy, ugly aircraft used to haul rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong, or worse, Detroit. Typically, fighter pilots wear elaborate uniforms which they claim are specially designed to be fireproof to protect them in case of an emergency. In actuality, however, the uniforms are made of a special type of cloth which repels beer stains.
A global view of Mercury, as seen by MESSENGER. Credit: NASA. Mercury sure is hot, but Venus is hotter. Venus is much further from the Sun, orbiting at a distance of more than 108 million kilometers. Average temperature there is a hellish 735 Kelvin, or 462 degrees Celsius â hot enough to melt lead. Venus imaged by Magellan Image Credit: NASA/JPL.
There is a tenuous, at best, atmosphere on Mercury. That means that the planet does not retain the heat it receives from the Sun as it rotates. The side facing the Sun is amazingly hot, around 700 Kelvin (430 Â°C), yet that same place on the planet can plunge to 110 Kelvin (-163 Â°C) when it is on the dark side.ercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System and orbits the Sun every 87.969 Earth days. At this time it does not have a moon, but some scientists speculate that it may have had a moon in the ancient past. It is their contention that the orbit of Mercuryâs moon decayed and it impacted the surface of the planet.