HONG KONG: New results from NASA’s now-defunct Messenger spacecraft show Mercury’s magnetic field switched on about four billion years ago, scientists said on Thursday.
Messenger spent four years orbiting Mercury before it ran out of fuel and crashed into the planet’s surface on April 30.
For several months before then, however, it flew closer and closer to the ground, relaying unprecedented pictures and details about the solar system’s innermost planet.
It was during several of these low-altitude passes that Messenger detected traces of magnetization in an ancient part of the planet’s crust, telltale fingerprints of a global magnetic field, a study published in this week’s issue of the journal Science shows.
The field may have been 100 times more powerful than what Mercury has today, said lead researcher Catherine Johnson, with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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