NASA
Astronomers have created the most detailed map yet of the surface of 16-Psyche, an asteroid that scientists believe may hold clues about how planets formed in our solar system. the interview paper Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, 16-Psyche has a very diverse surface of minerals, sand, and rocks, suggesting that its history may include mineral eruptions as well as collisions with other celestial bodies. The asteroid is the focus of NASA’s Psyche mission, due to launch later this year.
how are we I mentioned earlier16 clairvoyant M type asteroid (meaning it has a high metal content) orbits the sun in the main asteroid belt and is unusually similar to a potato. The long-favored hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed mineral core of a protoplanet (a minor planet) from the beginning of our Solar System whose crust and mantle have been eroded by collisions (or multiple collisions) with other bodies. In recent years, scientists have come to the conclusion that estimates of mass and density are incompatible All metal waste. Instead, it is likely to be a complex mixture of minerals and silicates.
Alternatively, an asteroid could once have been the primordial body of a particular class of stone and iron meteorites that were fragmented and reshaped to form a mixture of metal and silicate. Or maybe something like that 1 seriesA dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—with the exception of 16 Psyche, it may have experienced a period of iron volcanoes during cooling, leaving highly enriched minerals in these volcanic centers.
Scientists have long suspected that metal cores lie as deep as terrestrial planets like Earth. But these cores are buried too deep under the mantle and crusts to be detected by researchers. As the only metallic body ever discovered, Psyche provides an ideal opportunity to shed light on the formation of the rocky planets in our Solar System (Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars). NASA agreed self task In 2017, with the aim of sending a spacecraft into orbit around the asteroid and collecting important data on its properties.
On the left, the map shows surface features on Psyche, ranging from sandy (purple/low) to rocky (yellow/high) areas. The map on the right shows the abundance of minerals in Psyche, from low (purple) to high (yellow).
Previous mapping efforts relied on measuring infrared light reflected off the asteroid’s surface using various telescopes around the world. Last year, astronomers created a much higher resolution Psyche surface map based on 2019 observational data collected from all 66 radio antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
By combining all of these signals into a single artificial signal, the team achieved the resolution of a 16-kilometre (10-mile)-wide telescope—about 20 miles per pixel. This view allowed them to resolve many differences in the composition on the surface of the asteroid. Use this to create a file Heat Emissions Map From the surface of the asteroid with high accuracy 3D model until.
This latest map is based on hundreds of computer-simulated scenarios, each with a different composition of surface materials, while calculating the asteroid’s rotation. The team then compared these simulations to the actual heat emissions in the ALMA data to determine the most likely map of the 16-Psyche surface.
The result: that the asteroid is rich in minerals, but its distribution on its surface is different. A similarly varied distribution of silicates suggests that 16-Psyche may have had a siliceous mantle. In addition, the temperature of the material at the bottom of the craters changes faster than at the tip as the asteroid orbits. The authors suggest that these craters may contain sediments (“pools”) of fine-grained sand. This is somewhat surprising given 16-Psyche’s mass and stronger gravity compared to smaller asteroids that contain fine-grained material.
“These data show that the surface of the breath is heterogeneous, with marked differences in composition,” Simon Marchi said of the Southwest Research Institute, a Psyche Task researcher not involved in the current study. “One of the main goals of Psyche’s mission is to study the composition of the asteroid’s surface using gamma rays, neutron spectrometry, and color imaging. So the possibility of compositional variation is something the Psyche Science team is keen to do more research on.”
DOI: Journal of Geophysical Research, 2022. 10.1029/2021JE007091/a> (About DOIs).
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