Geodetic Evidence That Mercury Has A Solid Inner Core
Name
nihms-1529127.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
be38bb61c9e381c953baab0afb9fd8da
Author(s)
Genova, Antonio
Goossens, Sander
Mazarico, Erwan
Lemoine, Frank G.
Neumann, Gregory A.
Kuang, Weijia
Sabaka, Terence J.
Hauck, Steven A. II
Smith, David Edmund
Solomon, Sean C.
Date Issued
April 2019
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Genova, Antonio, et al. "Geodetic Evidence That Mercury Has A Solid Inner Core." Geophysical Research Letters 46:7(April 2019): 3625–3633 © 2019 Author(s)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Geodetic analysis of radio tracking measurements of the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft while in orbit about Mercury has yielded new estimates for the planet's gravity field, tidal Love number, and pole coordinates. The derived right ascension (α = 281.0082° ± 0.0009°; all uncertainties are 3 standard deviations) and declination (δ = 61.4164° ± 0.0003°) of the spin pole place Mercury in the Cassini state. Confirmation of the equilibrium state with an estimated mean (whole planet) obliquity ϵ of 1.968 ± 0.027 arcmin enables the confident determination of the planet's normalized polar moment of inertia (0.333 ± 0.005), which indicates a high degree of internal differentiation. Internal structure models generated by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo process and consistent with the geodetic constraints possess a solid inner core with a radius (ric) between 0.3 and 0.7 that of the outer core (roc).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL081135
