First Estimate of Mercury's Surface Iron Abundance from Neutron Spectroscopy

Details First Estimate of Mercury's Surface Iron Abundance from Neutron Spectroscopy First Estimate of Mercury's Surface Iron Abundance from Neutron Spectroscopy

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.u21a0027l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #U21A-0027

Physics

1027 Composition Of The Planets, 6235 Mercury

Scientific paper

Thermal neutrons, which are produced on Mercury's surface by galactic cosmic rays and measured by the MESSENGER Neutron Spectrometer (NS), are highly sensitive to the presence of iron and titanium. This high sensitivity is due to the fact that both iron and titanium have large absorption cross sections for thermal neutrons. By a form of Doppler Filter Spectroscopy, the NS successfully measured thermal neutrons from Mercury during the MESSENGER's first flyby of the planet in January 2008. These first thermal neutron data from Mercury were combined with neutron transport models of analog lunar soils to deduce that the average iron abundance of the Mercury surface material is less than ~6% by weight. This upper limit result is broadly consistent with previous estimates of iron abundances that suggest Mercury's surface has low iron abundances. Uncertainties in this iron abundance estimate are due mainly to systematic uncertainties in our understanding of the NS spatial response on the MESSENGER spacecraft. To reduce these uncertainties, we are conducting a detailed study of the neutron transport properties of the MESSENGER NS and spacecraft using the particle transport code MCNPX. These calculations, along with expected new data from MESSENGER's second Mercury flyby in October 2008 will enable us to: 1) achieve a more constrained estimate for or upper bound on Mercury's surface iron abundance from flyby data; and 2) refine the models and techniques for making maps of iron abundances using NS data from the mapping phase of the MESSENGER mission.

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