2015-05-09, 23:50
NASA's MESSENGER Spots Mercury's Ancient Magnetic Field
Tiny sun-baked Mercury may be more like mother Earth than anyone could have imagined; at least in terms of having a very long-lived global magnetic field. Before NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft ended its decade-long mission to our innermost planet in last week’s planned surface crash,it was able to detect and characterize weak ancient remanents of the field in magnetized crustal rocks.
In a paper published online in the journal Science, a team of planetary scientists and geophysicists report that Mercury actually qualifies as having the longest-lived global magnetic field of any planet in our inner solar system. During its last low-flying days, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft found extremely weak signatures of this original field which may date back some four billion years.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedormine...uture-tech
Tiny sun-baked Mercury may be more like mother Earth than anyone could have imagined; at least in terms of having a very long-lived global magnetic field. Before NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft ended its decade-long mission to our innermost planet in last week’s planned surface crash,it was able to detect and characterize weak ancient remanents of the field in magnetized crustal rocks.
In a paper published online in the journal Science, a team of planetary scientists and geophysicists report that Mercury actually qualifies as having the longest-lived global magnetic field of any planet in our inner solar system. During its last low-flying days, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft found extremely weak signatures of this original field which may date back some four billion years.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedormine...uture-tech