Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Jun 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006sf2a.conf..425r&link_type=abstract
SF2A-2006: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics Eds.: D. Barret, F. Casoli, G.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Mercury is an extreme of our planetary system. It is the closest planet to the Sun and has the highest uncompressed density of all planets, indicating the existence of a large core. The detection of a magnetic field suggests that at least an upper layer of the core is still liquid and generates a magnetic field by dynamo action. These properties are major challenges for scenarios of Mercury's formation and play an important role in constraining and testing dynamical and compositional theories of planetary formation. Measurements of librations of Mercury, which depend on solar and planetary torques as well as on Mercury's shape and internal structure, will provide crucial information on geophysical parameters such as the size of the core and sulfur concentration of the core.
We investigate the librational response of the planet with particular emphasis on the influence of core-mantle coupling mechanisms. We use the SONYR model of the Solar System in order to reach a very accurate rotational motion of Mercury, and we introduce various core-mantle couplings (inertial, electromagnetic, viscous) to study their effects on libration, and to isolate the signature of the relevant geophysical parameters. Notably, we find that the amplitude of the 88-day libration presents a strong dependence on the radius of the core or, equivalently, on the concentration of sulfur in the core, and the range of amplitude values is larger than the observational accuracy of NASA MESSENGER and ESA BepiColombo missions, indicating the possibility to discriminate between models of internal structure by using accurate libration measurements.
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