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Messenger spacecraft to crash into Mercury

April 17, 2015 By Stephen Kenwright Leave a Comment

messengerThe Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or Messenger, NASA spacecraft made discovery of ice and other materials on Mercury.

Around April 30, the spacecraft is going to make a crash landing into the planet.

The spacecraft is studying the inner most planet of the solar system, Mercury for more than four years.

It is the first close study of the planets since the NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft made three flybys in the mid 1970.

Messenger is losing altitude and is out of fuel and is expected to make a high speed crash landing at around 3:25 EDT near the planets north pole, as reported by flight controllers.

Daniel O’Shaughnessy, systems engineer with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which operates the spacecraft said, “The spacecraft will pass behind the planet, out of view from the Earth, and will just not emerge again.”

The spacecraft will be travelling at 8,724 miles per hour or 14,040 km per hour.

The impact will leave a fresh crater which would be roughly 52 feet or 16 meters in diameter.

Astronomers believe that this may serve as an interesting reference point for a follow on European spacecraft called BepiColombo, which is due to arrive in 2024.

The crater will help scientist to understand the fast weathering process of the planet.

This is one of the findings of Messenger.

Other finding of Messenger is the detection of elements such as sulfur, potassium on planet’s surface; this is a strange finding because the volatile material should evaporate under the extreme heat conditions.

Mercury is 36 million miles or 58 million km away from the sun, this where it was formed and orbiting the sun.

Earth is 93 million miles from the sun.

Messenger also detected ice and other materials, even carbon based organics on the surface of the planet where sunlight never reaches.

Lead scientist Sean Solomon, with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York said as the spacecraft is descending it will attempt to peer directly inside the targeted craters.

It will also look for magnetized crust and solve the mystery why such a tiny planet is having such a strong magnetic field. The magnetic field is asymmetric.

Filed Under: Discovery Tagged With: mercury, MESSENGER spacecraft

Mercury’s dark surface due to dust accumulated by passing comets

March 31, 2015 By Jeff Suchon

MercuryMercury is covered by a thin layer of black dust from billions of years of deposit accumulated by passing comets.

The comet dust acts like an invisible paint and lowers the reflective properties of the planet.

Comet dust is rich in carbon material and it is 25 percent made of carbon.

The planets that don’t have atmosphere regularly face impacts from micrometeorites and this generates a thin layer of tiny particles of nanophase iron that can darken the surface.

Spectral analysis shows that theses material concentrations on Mercury aren’t high enough to produce this thin layer of invisible paint.

According to Megan Bruck Syal of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Mercury’s low reflectance is due to some darkening agent.

Comets are frozen bodies and they break up as they approach the sun and mercury being so close to sun there are high chances that it is exposed to comet dust from billions of years.

Mercury is now made of 3 to 6 percent of carbon, from micrometeorites and comets.

They have used Ames Vertical Gun Range to prove this theory.

They have conducted experiments on how the surface has darkened with impacts and scattering of the material.

After the experiment they found that this process has reduced the reflectivity of comet by 5 percent similar to the darkest region on mercury.

It also revealed that the layer is undetectable.

 

Filed Under: Discovery Tagged With: invisible paint, mercury

Planet Mercury’s composition : NASA MESSENGER new findings

March 18, 2015 By Stephanie James

nasa messsenger

NASA MESSENGER team has provided two new maps of mercury’s surface which shows unidentified regions.

MESSENGER an acronym for mercury surface, space environment, geochemistry, and ranging is the NASA spacecraft orbiting mercury. It has entered mercury’s orbit on March 2011. It is designed to study the chemical composition of surface, geological history, magnetic field, size and state of core.

The maps were created using the X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) and the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (GRS) of the MESSENGER and they also provided information on the concentrations of potassium, sodium, chlorine, and silicon, thorium, uranium, as well as ratios relative to silicon of magnesium, aluminum.

The new maps show unidentified regions of mercury known as “geochemical terranes” which has different composition than the surrounding crust. These terranes provide insights into the formation of the outer surface of Mercury.

“The consistency of the new XRS and GRS maps provides a new dimension to our view of Mercury’s surface, the terranes we observed had not been previously identified on the basis of spectral reflectance or geographical mapping.” said the study’s lead author Shoshana Weider, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Geochemical maps for some of the rations and elements were limited to one hemisphere and had poor spatial resolution. But a different methodology called the X-Ray fluorescence technique by which X-Rays emitted from the sun’s atmosphere will help examine the planets composition.  This technique has been used to produce global maps of aluminum/silicon and magnesium/silicon abundance ratios from the data provided by XRS. This is the first global geochemical maps of Mercury and the first maps of global extent for any planetary body by using this technique.

The global aluminum and magnesium maps are paired with the less spatially complete maps of calcium/silicon, iron/silicon and sulfur/silicon to study the geochemical characteristics of the surface.

The most visible of these geochemical terrane is a large feature covering over 5 million square kilometers. This terrane “exhibits the highest magnesium/silicon, sulfur/silicon, and calcium/silicon ratios, and some lowest aluminum /silicon ratios on the planet’s surface” said Shoshana Weider from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. This high magnesium region could be because of an impact long ago. This indicates that the exposed mantel could have aided in the formation of this large feature.
The second map which is the geochemical terranes of mercury’s northern hemisphere by MESSENGERS GRS shows the absorption of the low-energy thermal neutrons across the surface. By this the distribution of the neutron absorbing elements like iron, sodium can be identified. This information combined with MESSENGERS XRS information helped to identify four geochemical terranes on mercury

“Earlier MESSENGER data have shown that Mercury’s surface was pervasively shaped by volcanic activity, the magmas erupted long ago were derived from the partial melting of Mercury’s mantle. The differences in composition that we are observing among geochemical terranes indicate that Mercury has a chemically heterogeneous mantle.” said Peplowski.

“The crust we see on Mercury was largely formed more than three billion years ago,” said Carnegie’s Larry Nittler.

“The remarkable chemical variability revealed by MESSENGER observations will provide critical constraints on future efforts to model and understand Mercury’s bulk composition and the ancient geological processes that shaped the planet’s mantle and crust.”

Filed Under: Discovery Tagged With: geochemical terrane, maps, mercury, MESSENGER, NASA

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