#mercury

#mercury

Is Mercury Full of Diamonds?Mercury has been the landing zone of meteorites for billions of years. While those impacts might have ruined the surface of the planet, there is also a possibility they might have blessed Mercury with precious gemstones as well. According to planetary scientist Kevin Cannon, the impacts created high pressures and temperatures that can transform carbon into diamonds. “What we think happened is that when [Mercury] first formed, it had a magma ocean and that graphite crystallized out of that magma,” Cannon explained.The scientist simulated 4.5 billion years of impacts on a graphite crust to find out how diamonds could be formed on the Mercurian surface. The findings show that if the planet had a skin of graphite around 300 meters thick, the impacts would have generated 16 quadrillion tons of diamonds. Wow. An opportunity to confirm Cannon’s hypothesis on the formation of gemstones could be done in 2025 when the BepiColombo mission reaches the planet.image credit: wikimedia commons #Mercury #diamonds #planetaryscience #space

Hear Mercury for the First Time: ESA BepiColombo's First Sound from the Planetary FlybyThe ESA's BepiColombo spacecraft did a successful Mercury flyby earlier this October. During its flyby, the spacecraft not only captured some stunning photos of the planet's surface. It also captured some audio from the journey. Engineers from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have transformed this audio data from the spacecraft into a sonification, and now we can hear it with our own ears.It is clarified, however, that these sounds are not acoustic waves. In reality, they are spacecraft vibrations captured by the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) instrument aboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), one of the satellites that comprise the BepiColombo spacecraft.Still, it's really cool!(Image Credit: Europlanet via Twitter)#Astronomy #Space #ESA #JAXA #Mercury #BepiColombo #Sonification

Spacecraft BepiColombo Took a Snapshot of Venus During a Gravity Assist ManeuverThe spacecraft BepiColombo, a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan's space agency JAXA, flew by Venus on its way to Mercury.Earlier this week, while performing a "gravity assist maneuver," BepiColombo took a snapshot of Venus in black and white. The spacecraft was 1,573 km (977 miles) away from the planet - at its closest, the spacecraft was just 552 km (342 miles) away.In the photo, you can see the high-gain antenna on the Mercury Planetary Orbiter at the top-left corner of the image.If you're wondering about the name, BepiColombo is named after Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo (1920 - 1984), a scientist at the University of Padua, Italy, who first suggested the gravity assist maneuver.Image: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM#spaceexploration #venus #BeliColombo #spacecraft #MercuryPlanetaryOrbiter #mercury #ESA #JAXA