Now that the MESSENGER orbiter has been gathering data on Mercury's craters for three years, NASA wants to name some of them and has invited the public to help.
According to the Washington Post, the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft is nearing the end of its days in orbit of the closest planet to the sun. Launched in 2004 and arrived at Mercury in March of 2011, the probe has outlasted expectations.
MESSENGER is on track to exhaust all its fuel by March 2015, at which point it will crash down onto Mercury's surface.
Rosemary Killen, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, led a study in the journal Icarus
that found Mercury to experience a regular meteor shower.
"The possible discovery of a meteor shower at Mercury is really exciting and especially important because the plasma and dust environment around Mercury is relatively unexplored," Killen said in a press release.
Study co-author Joseph Hahn, a planetary dynamist in the Austin office of the Space Science Institute, said Mercury passes through other planet's meteor showers.
"If our scenario is correct, Mercury is a giant dust collector," he said in the release. "The planet is under steady siege from interplanetary dust and then regularly passes through this other dust storm, which we think is from comet Encke."
With so much focus on the rovers currently on Mars' surface and NASA's mission to put astronauts on the Red Planet, little attention is paid to NASA's other projects.
"The variation of Mercury's calcium exosphere with the planet's position in its orbit has been known for several years from MESSENGER observations, but the proposal that the source of this variation is a meteor shower associated with a specific comet is novel," Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator, said in the release. "This study should provide a basis for searches for further evidence of the influence of meteor showers on the interaction of Mercury with its solar-system environment."
