Mercury's Rotation and Sulfur Concentration in the Core

Details Mercury's Rotation and Sulfur Concentration in the Core Mercury's Rotation and Sulfur Concentration in the Core

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.2509r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #25.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.460

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Mercury presents a high uncompressed density, indicating the existence of a large core. Mariner 10 measured a faint magnetic field suggesting that the outer core is fluid and generates a magnetic field by dynamo action. These features are major challenges for scenarios of Mercury's formation. An accurate knowledge of the librations of Mercury, which depend both on external and internal torques, provide crucial information on geophysical parameters. Recent ground-based radar measurements combined with future data from MESSENGER and BepiColombo space missions will provide unprecedented constraints on Mercury's internal structure by accurately measuring the rotational motion of the planet. First, we present a simple dynamical model of the rotation of Mercury developed in (Rambaux, Lemaitre, & D'Hoedt, A&A 470) to study Mercury's global phase space and quantify the libration areas. We find that the use of the adiabatic invariant allows to establish a simple analytical model of the coupled rotation of Mercury. This model can be used in different applications that require a first-order rotational motion such as the one describing the influence of the precession and rotation of the planet on the orbit of an artificial satellite around Mercury. Second, we present the results of a theoretical characterization of a fluid core from the knowledge of the Hermean librations (Rambaux, Van Hoolst, Dehant, & Bois 2007, A&A, 468). To this aim, we have used the SONYR model (Bois, Journet, Vokrouhlicky and Rambaux) and included different core-mantle couplings. We identified the signatures of the relevant geophysical parameters and shown that the amplitude of the 88-day libration depends essentially on the concentration of sulfur in the core, which influences the core's density and as a result its size. The next step to surely conclude on the nature and size of Mercury's core will be to fit the model to space observations.

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