German Aerospace Center

These wrinkles, some of them miles tall, cover the entire planet in a complex pattern of buckling and folding.

Scientists from the German Aerospace Center discovered in 2019 that Mercury is shrinking 30% more than previously believed, losing up to 14 miles in diameter.

This greater-than-expected shrinkage fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about Mercury's internal composition, cooling rate, and thermal history.

The scarp patterns, when mapped carefully, reveal a world that has been quietly contracting.

The cosmos version of a grape shriveling into a raisin under the sun.

Scientists for the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Space Research reported Thursday that mercury shrinkage may be 30% greater than previously believed.

A blossom diameter as much as 14 miles.

Mercury's rough surface, continually reshaped by debris hurled from impact craters, may have hidden the true extent of the loss, according to the researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Knowing the makeup of the planet's dark surface is also important.

A team at DLR, the German Space Agency, have built a special chamber to heat up samples to examine how they behave at high temperatures.

These can then be compared with what will be found on the planet.

Planetary scientists are unsure how it formed.

Every time we went there, we found new surprising results, and, uh, that is the reason why we do BepiColombo.

And we hope with BepiColombo, on one hand, we are able to answer many of these new question, but I'm pretty sure we found a lot of new surprising results which raise new and other question which we then need to follow up.

And in that report from ESA TV, we heard from BepiColombo Project Scientist, Johannes Benkhoff, and DLR Planetary Scientist, Jörn Helbert.

This is Space Time.

BELE was developed by an international consortium, which reflects its importance.

You have the University of Bern in Switzerland taking the lead, working alongside the German Aerospace Center, and cooperating with the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain.

Wow.

It is a massive pooling of intellectual and financial resources for one heavy-hitting instrument.

Exactly ten years earlier, to the very day, on September 14th, 2016, the BELE laser altimeter was packed up and left the laboratory at Bern to be transported for final integration onto the spacecraft.

A ten-year anniversary, a full decade since this intricate piece of hardware left its home on Earth.

And on this exact anniversary, the instrument team from the University of Bern and the German Aerospace Center decided to fully activate the BELE laser altimeter in space for the very first time since the spacecraft launched.

That's crazy.

I know you're saying, "Well, what about Pluto?" Well, Pluto was declared a non-planet not that long ago.

So this research into Mercury comes from the German Aerospace Center.

They say that the oddball planet shriveling could be occurring at an even faster than expected rate.

Mercury, they figure, has lost about 15 miles of its total diameter since it formed billions of years ago.

ISAR Aerospace's two-stage Spectrum rocket lifted off from the company's launch complex at Andøya Space in Norway.

The onward and upward mission deployed payloads chosen through the Micro Launcher Competition, a program run by the German Space Agency at DLR and funded through the European Space Agency's BOOST initiative.

ISAR says it's still confirming the satellite's status with customers.

The flight hit its major milestones.

This new work argues it's the second for a reason that's almost embarrassingly simple once somebody says it out loud.

This is Gaku Nishiyama, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin with colleagues in Japan, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on Thursday the 10th.

And the simple reason is?

Impact craters bury the cliffs.