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Stuff from the DPS-EPSC conference, day 3
Oct. 5th, 2011 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steorraFirst, stuff written up by other people.
It looks like there's only one press release today, on MESSENGER at Mercury (related graphics here). Among other things, Mercury's magnetic field is weird - it's shifted north by about 20% of Mercury's radius, so the field is stronger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere.
Emily Lakdawalla's daily summary is also all about MESSENGER's results at Mercury, and goes into some stuff that didn't make it into the press release, such as that Mercury seems to be made of darker stuff than the Moon, and that Mercury has a smaller range of heights between highest and lowest than the Moon or Mars. (Mercury: about 10 km; Moon: about 20 km; Mars: about 30 km).
Stuff from Twitter; again, take with many grains of salt, because I don't know what distortions I may have introduced.
Mercury
Elaboration on the weird magnetic field: the magnetic field's axis is aligned with the rotational axis, to within 3 degrees; but the magnetic field itself is shifted north along that axis.
Mercury's crust is about 50-80 km thick at the equator, 20-40 km thick at the north pole.
Mercury's surface is low in titanium and iron, but has lots of sulfur.
Enceladus
The state of relaxation of craters in the northern hemisphere of Enceladus indicates that even heavily cratered parts of Enceladus (i.e., the parts where craters haven't been overrun by geological activity) indicates that even those regions have to have had a (relatively) high heat flux in the past.
Earth's Moon
Ancient craters and relatively recent craters have different size distributions. The size distribution of ancient craters looks like what you'd get if you took stuff indiscriminately from the main asteroid belt and smashed it into the Moon. The size distribution of more recent craters looks like the size distribution of near-earth objects, which are removed from the main asteroid belt by a process that's affected by size, the Yarkovsky effect.
Other stuff
Saturn's moon Aegaeon is really really elongated: 1.4 x 0.5 x 0.4 km.
Twitter sources:
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spacemandave
DrFunkySpoon
elakdawalla
asrivkin
It looks like there's only one press release today, on MESSENGER at Mercury (related graphics here). Among other things, Mercury's magnetic field is weird - it's shifted north by about 20% of Mercury's radius, so the field is stronger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere.
Emily Lakdawalla's daily summary is also all about MESSENGER's results at Mercury, and goes into some stuff that didn't make it into the press release, such as that Mercury seems to be made of darker stuff than the Moon, and that Mercury has a smaller range of heights between highest and lowest than the Moon or Mars. (Mercury: about 10 km; Moon: about 20 km; Mars: about 30 km).
Stuff from Twitter; again, take with many grains of salt, because I don't know what distortions I may have introduced.
Mercury
Elaboration on the weird magnetic field: the magnetic field's axis is aligned with the rotational axis, to within 3 degrees; but the magnetic field itself is shifted north along that axis.
Mercury's crust is about 50-80 km thick at the equator, 20-40 km thick at the north pole.
Mercury's surface is low in titanium and iron, but has lots of sulfur.
Enceladus
The state of relaxation of craters in the northern hemisphere of Enceladus indicates that even heavily cratered parts of Enceladus (i.e., the parts where craters haven't been overrun by geological activity) indicates that even those regions have to have had a (relatively) high heat flux in the past.
Earth's Moon
Ancient craters and relatively recent craters have different size distributions. The size distribution of ancient craters looks like what you'd get if you took stuff indiscriminately from the main asteroid belt and smashed it into the Moon. The size distribution of more recent craters looks like the size distribution of near-earth objects, which are removed from the main asteroid belt by a process that's affected by size, the Yarkovsky effect.
Other stuff
Saturn's moon Aegaeon is really really elongated: 1.4 x 0.5 x 0.4 km.
Twitter sources:
