Small Collisions Make Big Impact on Mercury’s Thin Atmosphere
Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning micro-meteor showers.
Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, a mission that observed Mercury from 2011 to 2015 — has shed new light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided bombardment of Mercury’s surface by tiny dust particles called micrometeoroids. This study also gave new insight into how these micrometeoroid showers can shape Mercury’s very thin atmosphere, called an exosphere.
The research, led by Petr Pokorný, Menelaos Sarantos and Diego Janches of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, simulated the variations in meteoroid impacts, revealing surprising patterns in the time of day impacts occur. These findings were reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 19, 2017.
Here, data from the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, instrument is overlain on the mosaic from the Mercury Dual Imaging System, or MDIS.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
