Sentences with word «micrometeoroids»

Because Mercury rotates so slowly — once every 58 Earth days, compared to a Mercury year, a complete trip around the Sun, lasting only 88 Earth days — the part of the planet at dawn spends a disproportionately long time in the path of one of the solar system's primary populations of micrometeoroids.

Pokorný and his team hope that their initial findings will improve our understanding of the rate at which comet - based micrometeoroids impact Mercury, further improving the accuracy of models of Mercury and its exosphere.

The distributions of other species, like Mg and Ca, as observed by MESSENGER, peak at dawn, consistently with a release induced by micrometeoroid vaporization, assuming a preferential precipitation in the leading side (Burger et al. 2014).

Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, a mission that observed Mercury from 2011 to 2015 — has shed new light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided bombardment of Mercury's surface by tiny dust particles called micrometeoroids.

Their optimism comes from a new method for welding thin metal wires into tethers that can withstand micrometeoroid impacts.

«There is a possibility of the tether being severed by impacts of small debris objects or micrometeoroids,» says a JAXA spokesperson.

Engineers suspected a micrometeoroid strike may have damaged the equipment since three circuits failed suddenly and simultaneously on 8 December.

Scientists used models along with earlier findings from the MESSENGER mission to shed light on how certain types of comets influence the micrometeoroids that preferentially impact Mercury on the dawn side of the planet.

This study also gave new insight into how these micrometeoroid showers can shape Mercury's very thin atmosphere, called an exosphere.

These harder collisions helped the team further key in on the source of the micrometeoroids pummeling Mercury's surface.

The similar H2O fluxes per unit area found in the four giant planets and Titan (Feuchtgruber et al. 1997; Coustenis et al. 1998; Moses et al. 2000), combined with the rather constant dust flux (∼ 3 × 10 − 18 g cm − 2 s − 1) measured in interplanetary space beyond 5 AU (Landgraf et al. 2002), have been regarded as evidence that micrometeoroids — interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) or interstellar — are the dominant source (Moses et al. 2000).

It puts you in control of humanity's first manned mission to Mars, just as it's struck by a micrometeoroid storm.