相关论文: Boulders on Mercury
The surface conditions of terrestrial bodies strongly reflect their geological evolutionary processes and vary among various terrestrial bodies. This diversity is attributed to variations in the timescales of boulder formation through…
Like many airless planetary surfaces, the surface of the Moon is scattered by populations of blocks and smaller boulders. These features decrease in abundance with increasing exposure time due to comminution by impact bombardment and…
It has been recently recognized that the surface of sub-km asteroids in contact with the space environment is not fine-grained regolith but consists of centimeter to meter-scale rocks. Here we aim to understand how the rocky morphology of…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
Late accretion is a process that strongly modulated surface geomorphic and geochemical features of Mercury. Yet, the fate of the impactors and their effects on Mercury's surface through the bombardment epoch are not clear. Using Monte-Carlo…
A circumsolar dust ring has been recently discovered close to the orbit of Mercury. There are currently no hypotheses for the origin of this ring in the literature, so we explore four different origin scenarios here: the dust originated…
Mercury's crust has a complex structure resulting from a billion years of volcanism. The surface variations in chemical composition have been identified from orbit by the spacecraft MESSENGER. Combining these measurements with laboratory…
This work investigates the macroscopic thermomechanical behavior of lunar boulders by modeling their response to diurnal thermal forcing. Our results reveal a bimodal, spatiotemporally-complex stress response. During sunrise, stresses occur…
We mapped all boulders larger than 105 m on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres using images of the Dawn framing camera acquired in the Low Altitude Mapping Orbit (LAMO). We find that boulders on Ceres are more numerous towards high latitudes…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
The study of meter and sub-meter scale geological features, especially boulders and boulder fields, on the surface of airless bodies can provide insight into the evolution of the regolith and the contribution of various processes to its…
Boulders are ubiquitously found on the surfaces of small rocky bodies in the inner solar system and their spatial and size distributions give insight into the geological evolution and collisional history of the parent bodies. Using images…
Modern terrestrial planet formation models are highly successful at consistently generating planets with masses and orbits analogous to those of Earth and Venus. In stark contrast to classic theoretical predictions and inferred demographics…
By using recent observations of the Dydimos-Dimorphos system from the Hubble Space Telescope, 37 boulders with a size of 4 to 7 meters ejected from the system during the impact with the DART spacecraft were identified. In this work, we…
The MESSENGER mission sought to discover what physical processes determined Mercury's high metal to silicate ratio. Instead, the mission has discovered multiple anomalous characteristics about our innermost planet. The lack of FeO and the…
To characterize the meteoroid environment around Mercury and its contribution to the planet's exosphere, we combined four distinctive sources of meteoroids in the solar system: main-belt asteroids, Jupiter family comets, Halley-type comets,…
The chemical composition of a planetary body reflects its starting conditions modified by numerous processes during its formation and geological evolution. Measurements by X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutron spectrometers on the MESSENGER…
Multiple nations are planning activity on the Moon's surface, and to deconflict lunar operations we must understand the sandblasting damage from rocket exhaust blowing soil. Prior research disagreed over the scaling of the erosion rate,…
Meteor and bolide phenomena caused by the atmospheric ablation of incoming meteoroids are predicted to occur at the planet Venus. Their systematic observation would allow to measure and compare the sub-mm to m meteoroid flux at different…
The identification of impact craters on planetary surfaces provides important information about their geological history. Most studies have relied on individual analysts who map and identify craters and interpret crater statistics. However,…