NASA
Astronomers have created the most detailed map yet of the surface of 16-Psyche, an asteroid that scientists say may hold clues to the formation of planets in our solar system. to me paper Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, 16-Psyche has a very diverse surface of minerals, sand, and rocks, suggesting that its history could include mineral eruptions as well as collisions with other celestial bodies. The asteroid is the centerpiece of NASA’s Psyche mission, which will launch later this year.
as we are I mentioned earlier16 Psych 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 early days of our solar system, with its crust and mantle stripped from collisions (or multiple collisions) with other bodies. Scientists have concluded in recent years that estimates of mass and density do not match: full metal residue† Alternatively, it is likely to be a complex mixture of minerals and silicates.
Alternatively, the asteroid may one day be the original body of a certain class of stone and iron meteorites, which shattered and turned into a mixture of metal and silicates. Or maybe something like that 1 seriesA dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except for 16 pseudobulbs that may have gone through a period of iron volcanoes during cooling, leaving highly enriched minerals in those volcanic centers.
Scientists have long suspected that metal cores lie as deep as terrestrial planets like Earth. But these cores are buried too far under the mantle and rock crusts for researchers to detect. As the only metallic body ever discovered, Psyche provides an ideal opportunity to shed light on how the rocky planets in our Solar System (Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars) formed. NASA agreed self task In 2017, the goal was to send a spacecraft into orbit around the asteroid and collect important data about its properties.
On the left, the map shows surface features on Psyche, 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 attempts were based on measuring infrared light bouncing off the asteroid’s surface using several telescopes around the world. Last year, astronomers produced a high-resolution Psyche surface map, based on 2019 observational data collected by 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 an accuracy equivalent to a telescope with a diameter of 16 kilometers (10 miles) — about 20 miles per pixel. This insight allowed them to resolve many of the compositional differences on the asteroid’s surface. Use this to create a file heat emission map From the surface of the asteroid with high accuracy 3D model yourself.
This latest map is based on hundreds of computer-simulated scenarios, each with a different mixture of surface material composition, taking into account the asteroid’s rotation. The team then compared those simulations to the actual heat emissions in the ALMA data to determine the most likely map of the 16-Psyche’s surface.
The result: that the asteroid is rich in minerals, but its distribution on its surface is different. The equally varied distribution of silicates indicates that 16-Psyche may have had a silicic acid-rich mantle. In addition, the temperature of the material at the bottom of the craters changes faster than along the edge as the asteroid is spinning. The authors suggest that these craters may contain sediments (“pools”) of fine-grained sand. This is a bit surprising given 16-Psyche’s mass and stronger gravity, compared to smaller asteroids that contain fine-grained matter.
“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 researcher on a psychological task who was 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, a neutron spectrometer, and a color image sensor. So the potential for compositional differences is something the Psyche Science team would like to explore further.”
DOI: Journal of Geophysical Research, 2022. 10.1029/2021JE007091/a> (About DOIs†
