Tag: mercury
As Messenger Nears Crash Landing On Mercury, Scientists Racing To Collect Best Data Yet

As Messenger Nears Crash Landing On Mercury, Scientists Racing To Collect Best Data Yet

By Scott Dance, The Baltimore Sun

BALTIMORE — NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has swung around its namesake planet for three years, beaming observations of Mercury back to Earth, but next March it will smash into the cratered surface it has been studying from afar.

The satellite’s oblong orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet brings it gradually closer and closer as it looks into Mercury’s mysterious volcanoes, craters, and magnetic field. With dwindling fuel to counteract the dense planet’s pull, the scientists managing the mission at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel can only delay its fall for so long.

It’s now orbiting as close as several dozen miles above the planet’s gray, dimpled crust — and soon, closer. Data collected in the final months of the decade-long mission to explore the inner solar system could help prove the presence of ice in polar craters and provide more detailed accounts of what volatile elements are contained in lava flows or the mysterious depressions on the planet’s surface.

Those “bonus” observations depend on Messenger’s instruments holding up to the 800-degree heat radiating from Mercury’s surface during the slow-rotating planet’s prolonged days. The planet, named for the Roman god of messages, makes one revolution around the sun every 88 Earth days, and yet it rotates so slowly that it takes 176 Earth days for one solar day to pass on Mercury.

As long as the instruments hold up, they could add detail and nuance to data that is expected be used by scientists for decades to come, providing insights into how planetary systems form around stars across the universe.

“Every time we’ve gone somewhere in the solar system and looked with higher resolution, we’ve made new discoveries,” said Larry Nittler, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who is deputy principal investigator of the $500 million project’s science team.

Since its launch in 2004, Messenger has made plenty of discoveries.

Much of what was known about the planet closest to the sun came from NASA’s Mariner 10 mission, which flew past Mercury and Venus in 1974 and 1975. Mariner found early signs of Mercury’s iron core, small magnetic field, and minimal atmosphere.

Messenger began sending photographs and other observations of the planet in January 2008, eventually cataloging the entire surface for the first time. The closer it got to the planet, the more theories it confirmed and disproved.

When Messenger began an elongated, elliptical orbit around Mercury in 2011, the data were even more dramatic.

Scientists predicted they would find few “volatile” elements — abundant here on Earth but with boiling points too low to be expected to withstand Mercury’s heat — in the planet’s crust. But they found astonishingly high levels of sodium and potassium, as well as surprisingly low levels of iron. They also found signs of significant volcanic activity, perhaps not as distant in the past as once expected.

They mapped its magnetic field and found it to be asymmetrical, unlike Earth’s, with its magnetic equator located about 20 percent of the way toward the pole.

And they believe they have confirmed that some craters at the planet’s poles contain ice — the holes are deep enough to remain in permanent shadow.

“In many cases, a lot of our original ideas about Mercury were just plain wrong,” Nittler told the Baltimore Sun in June 2011, after just three months of data collection in orbit.

Now scientists hope to prove more theories wrong, or right, as the case may be.

A closer view could prove the presence of ice in the polar craters and provide greater detail of what elements are in different geographic features. Images from the first year of orbit showed, at best, 10 meters per pixel, but are now approaching 2 meters per pixel. Observations of magnetic fields and elemental composition are similarly getting increasingly detailed.

One feature scientists are particularly interested in getting a closer look at is what are known as hollows, irregularly shaped depressions with bright, flat floors and halo-like markings around them. They believe a combination of the planet’s heat, its constant bombardment by tiny meteors, and the powerful effects of charged solar particles could be causing materials in surface rocks, likely sulfur or potassium, to sublimate — transforming from solid to gas without first becoming liquid — leaving the curious craters behind.

“We’ve always had to squint at the images to see the details,” said Nancy Chabot, instrument scientist for Messenger’s cameras, the Mercury Dual Imaging System. “We’re getting new insights into the depths of these features and what the edges look like in more detail.”

Any more data the mission is able to collect before Messenger crashes or is fried by the heat will be the last gathered on Mercury for years. Last year, NASA signed on to the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo mission, which plans to send two spacecraft to Mercury in 2022 to gather more data on the planet’s composition, core, and magnetic field.

Photo: Baltimore Sun/MCT/Barbara Haddock Taylor

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Mercury Is Slowly Shrinking, Scientists Say

Mercury Is Slowly Shrinking, Scientists Say

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

They say the world is getting smaller — and in Mercury’s case it’s literally true. Though it’s already the tiniest planet in the solar system, scientists say Mercury is still shrinking — and signs of that contraction can be clearly seen in distortions of the planet’s searing surface.

The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, solve a decades-old mystery about the evolution of the little planet’s interior and provide scientists a window into the long-term changes that affect other worlds that don’t have Earth-like plate tectonics.

“Determining the extent to which Mercury contracted is key to understanding the planet’s thermal, tectonic and volcanic history,” the study authors, led by Paul Byrne of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, wrote in the paper.

Mercury is a weird little world. As the solar system’s innermost planet, it sits less than 36 million miles from the sun — less than two-fifths of the Earth-to-sun distance. It’s mostly made up of its heavy iron core, which has about a 1,255-mile radius and leaves a thin rind of just 261 miles for its crust and mantle. Even though it’s unbearably hot, the planet also hosts permanently shadowed regions inside craters that are among the coldest spots in the solar system.

Researchers have long thought that Mercury must be shrinking, because as the planet cools, and the liquid iron core turns solid over time, it contracts. If so, signs of deformation should show up on the planet’s surface — like a plump, smooth-skinned grape that dries up, shrinks and turns into a wrinkly raisin.

Sure enough, when NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet in 1974 and 1975, it discovered strange, snaking “lobate scarps” on the surface of the planet. Those scarps, which are Mercury’s version of mountain ranges, were the signs that the planet had shrunk, causing its rocky skin to deform.

But Mariner 10 imaged only 45 percent of the planet, and scientists could account for only about 0.5 to 2 miles of shrinkage in the radius. The models said that Mercury’s radius should have shrunk roughly 3 to 6 miles over the last 4 billion years, since its crust solidified. Were the models wrong? Or was it simply that we hadn’t seen enough of Mercury?

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which flew by the planet in 2008 and 2009 and entered Mercury’s orbit in 2011, solved the mystery by mapping the remaining 55 percent of the planet that Mariner 10 missed. Scientists found that the lobate scarps covered the whole globe randomly — and that these weren’t the only signs of shrinkage. The scientists found wrinkle ridges all over Mercury’s volcanic plains, and though they’re not as high or as dramatic as those lobate scarps, they’re also a reliable sign that Mercury has been contracting, and can help researchers measure how much volume has been lost.

Based on this new view of Mercury, the researchers found that the planet’s radius had probably shrunk about 3 to 4.3 miles since its crust solidified — safely within range of the theoretical predictions.

“The findings provide a global framework for investigations into Mercury’s surface and interior evolution,” planetary scientist William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis wrote in a commentary on the paper.

All planets, Earth included, are cooling down over time — but the findings don’t apply to Earth because our home planet has constantly shifting tectonic plates and Mercury is a one-plate planet. Still, these wrinkly, mountain-like features have also been seen on the moon and on Mars, and Mercury could make it a model for what happens to other single-plate planets.

“Mercury provides an example of what may really happen to a planet that is shrinking,” McKinnon wrote.

Photo: Lunar and Planetary Institute via Flickr