attain. English Collins Dictionary-English synonyms & Thesaurus &nbsp. attain (attains 3rd person present) (attaining present participle) (attained past tense & past participle) 1 verb If you attain something, you gain it or achieve it, often after a lot of effort. FORMAL Jim is halfway to attaining his pilot's licence.
The length of day on Mercury is 58.646 Earth days. This is a sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes Mercury to turn once on its axis compared to the background stars. If you could look down from above Mercuryâs north pole, it would take almost 59 days to turn in a counter-clockwise direction. Mosaic of Mercury. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / CIW / mosaic by Jason Perry. Things get unusual because a year on Mercury only lasts 88 days. And a solar day on Mercury lasts 176 Earth days. In other words, if you could stand on the surface of Mercury, it would take 176 days for the Sun to return to the same spot in the sky. Astronomers used to suspect that Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun, and always showed the same face to the Sun; similar to how the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth.
1 Mercury is a small planet in relation to some of the others in our Solar System, it is the second smallest planet in the Solar System, only 4,800km (3000 miles) in diameter. 2  Mercury takes 88 days to do a complete orbit around the Sun, so a year on Mercury is only 88 Earth days. At times Pluto is the 8th planet from the Sun, and other times it is the 9th planet from the Sun. ( 2 See this image for an illustration of why this happens) Because of Pluto's great distance from the Sun, it takes a very long time to orbit the Sun.