LONDON: Researchers using data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission recently revealed two new maps of the surface of Mercury, showing new details about the planet’s chemical composition.
These new maps even revealed chemical compositions for several large areas on the planet that we haven’t been able to study before. This new information could teach us more about Mercury’s ancient history.
The MESSENGER mission, which launched 10 years ago, is the first mission to study Mercury up close. It reached the planet’s orbit in 2011, where it started collecting data from its spectrometers to determine the chemical compositions of Mercury’s surface. So far, those instruments discovered concentrations of chlorine, potassium, magnesium, uranium, iron, sodium, calcium, silicon, aluminum, sulfur and thorium.
Scientists created maps of Mercury’s surface composition from that data, but those low-resolution maps only showed one hemisphere of the planet. However, now, MESSENGER scientists have used a new approach at getting better maps, including maps of the entire planet, revealing new insights about Mercury’s chemical makeup.
These scientists used a new technique called X-ray fluorescence, which uses the Sun’s X-rays to study a planet’s surface composition. They combined this new data with existing data and came up with maps that covered all of Mercury and provided additional detail about the hemisphere already studied.
