Mercury Flyby 1 |
Mercury Flyby 1 |
Dec 5 2007, 06:47 AM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 258 Joined: 22-December 06 Member No.: 1503 |
40 days and counting. The long wait is almost over!
I wonder whether we will get enough data to test new simulation theories like this one. http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19...solar-wind.html What do you expect from this first flyby? |
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Mar 26 2008, 09:54 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
During the post-Mariner analysis days, there was considerable effort to determine the latitude distribution and any preferred orientation of the scarps. Mercury was <is?> modeled as an initial ?normally? fast rotator (like Earth and Mars) that underwent tidal de-spinning till it was caught in the 3/2 resonance it's in today. The equator would have been spread out a bit and the poles sucked-in and flattened a bit. Despinning the planet should have resulted in crustal compression at the equator and stretching at the poles, with the stress at the equator being decidedly directional.
The models looked at the effects of the competition between despinning and relatively faster or slower global contraction on global stress patterns and resulting global faulting patterns. In some models, you'd see the effects balancing out at some latitudes resulting in no scarps or fractures, in other models, there's be scarps at some latitudes and graben <not seen> at others. There would also be directional orientations of the scarps at some latitudes. As I recall, the Mariner data showed little global variation in scarp abundance or orientation within the two low-to-moderate sun-angle zones where surface relief was well imaged. It's unclear to me whether some global variation was eventually teased out of the Mariner data or has only become apparent when much of the Mariner hi-sun-angle zone was imaged at lower sun angles and an entirely new longitude range was imaged with good illumination. Either way, there seems to be no mention of the old model work in the new analysis with mantle convection stress added to global contraction stresses in the press-release and media coverage of the new model work that I've seen. The emergence of geophysically meaningful planetary convection modeling on computer since the Mariner analysis days has resulted in the addition numical simulation experiments like these to planetary geophysics. Impressive capabilities, indeed! |
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