2023-06-22 07:21:00
Mercurio it was never that close. The European Space Agency (ESA) has just shared three photographs that the BepiColombo probe took the smallest of the planets in the solar system. But they are not three more images but the closest ones in the history of space exploration.
Mercury, the fastest of the planets in our system, moves at 47 kilometers per second and is the closest to the Sun.
The closest approach of the probe took place at 19:34 GMT on June 19, when the mission was located regarding 236 kilometers above the surface of the planet, on its dark side.
Mercury might be a diamond. BepiColombo sent photos that will be used to further study the Mercury soil.
Several things became clear regarding Mercury from these photos that have already been released worldwide: a surface as rough as Earth’s Moon, full of cratersancient volcanoes and solidified lava and the discovery of a crater that has just been named Edna Manley, following the British-Jamaican sculptor.
“[El cráter] will clearly be of interest to scientists at [la misión] BepiColombo in the future, because it has found dark ‘low reflectance material’ that might be remnants of the carbon-rich early crust of Mercury. In addition, the basin floor within its interior has been inundated by smooth lava, demonstrating Mercury’s long history of volcanic activity,” the agency explained in the statement it released.
The probe also captured images of the Beagle Rupes area, which NASA’s Messenger mission had identified more than ten years ago, when it managed to orbit Mercury for the first time. The Mercury Beagle is a 600 km cliff long, formed billions of years ago, when the planet cooled and wrinkled, deforming its crust until it became what we see today, a wrinkled shell.
The greater perfection of these images enables a comparison with the American ones, keeping in mind an extremely important fact presented by the American geologist Kevin Cannondedicated to the study of the planetary surfaces of the solar system.
Mercury might be a diamond in the rough
The engineer, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, explained at the 53rd Conference on Lunar and Planetary Sciences, held last year in Texas, that the soil of Mercury might harbor a very valuable diamond mine. Its crust, made up of a generous layer of graphite, might have generated diamonds from millions of years of meteorite impacts. Both diamond and graphite they have a very simple chemical composition; both are pure carbon.
You can’t breathe on Mercury because most of its atmosphere is made up of oxygen, sodium, hydrogen, helium, and potassium. The air that surrounds us, the atmospheric, is composed of a mixture of gases, mainly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen.
As planetary scientist Cannon explained, meteorite impacts transformed regarding one-third of Mercury’s crust into “a great deposit of diamonds, surpassing 16 times the estimated reserves on planet Earth”.
Mercury, diamond mine. Will we soon be millionaires?
This diamond formation process might be the consequence of the combination of the incessant impact of meteorites with extreme temperatures, which made craters appear, whose graphite linings then turned into diamonds.
Therefore, the space enterprise of approaching Mercury takes on a new dimension in light of the difficulties involved in the feat. “Being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury experiences extreme variations in its surface temperature, ranging from -180ºC to +430ºC,” explains ESA.
The BepiColombio mission was born from the cooperation between the European Union and Japan. It began in 2018 and its purpose is to explore the inner solar system for seven years. The next flyby of Mercury will take place on September 5, 2024. And without a doubt, they will go for more.
MM / ED
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