Weight of Mercury & Venus

[chetan]

How to find out the mass of Mercury & Venus

[Adrian Baker]

Originally posted by chetan
How to find out the mass of Mercury & Venus

Google gives the answeer direct. Type in Venus mass and you get the answer:
mass of Venus = 4.86900 × 10^24 kilograms

Google is VERY powerful and has many functions that you may be aware of... try it!

[Adrian Baker]

I meant to say 'may NOT of heard of..'

It converts units too... type in 'kilogram to pounds' (without the quotes and it gives you the conversion factor...

Google rocks!

[StephenPrivitera]

I think chetan meant, "How do we find the masses of Venus and Mercury empirically?" They don't have moons of course so you cant use that method. My guess is that maybe we use artificial satellites to measure their masses. Honestly, I don't know though.
Anyone else?

[Ambitwistor]

Yes, the orbits of space probes give us the best determination of their masses. (If Mercury and Venus had moons, we could use those, but they don't.)