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.
A World of Extremes. Since it is closest to the sun, Mercury has the shortest âyearâ of any planet, taking only 88 Earth days to complete one orbit. So every time Earth completes one orbit, Mercury has already made four trips around the sun. On the other hand, it has the longest solar day of any planet.