Planet Mercury is at the center of an incredible announcement from NASA, the European space agency taking a lot of people by surprise with a decision that was not exactly easy to guess by many people. Between 2011 and 2015, the planet Mercury had a spacecraft called MESSENGER in orbit, it was sent there by those from NASA to study it, together with Venus, and now the space agency has a surprising announcement about them.
Planet Mercury could help NASA calculate how long neutrons "survive" outside an atomic nucleus in outer space, the American space agency trying to use a new calculation method to solve a great mystery. Researchers know that neutrons decay in a maximum of 15 minutes when they are outside an atomic nucleus, but they have not yet been able to calculate the exact period in time, and the data taken from the planet Mercury and the planet Venus would be of great help to those from NASA.
Planet Mercury: NASA makes an INCREDIBLE Announcement for Mankind
Planet Mercury has in its orbit, where the MESSENGER ship also passed until 2015, many neutrons resulting from the collision of particles with large amounts of energy that hit the planet. Analyzing the data taken by the MESSENGER ship as it moves away from the planet Mercury, or Venus, those from NASA want to see how many of the neutrons were at greater distances from it, thus calculating how much they will last in certain periods of time time.
"The MESSENGER spacecraft orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 and flew by Venus on the way there, taking measurements of neutrons in the vicinity of the two planets. Neutrons are produced in reactions triggered by high-energy particles from space slamming into planets. By measuring how the number of detected neutrons decreased as the spacecraft got further from each planet, the researchers estimated how quickly those particles disappeared."
Planet Mercury has so far helped NASA to make a preliminary analysis on the basis of which the researchers would have established the fact that neutrons can last up to 13 minutes outside the atomic nucleus. The data are quite consistent with those obtained on the basis of other studies done by researchers to discover their "survival" period, but the data taken from the planet Mercury, or even Venus, could be of great help to discover the mystery.
Planet Mercury a new spacecraft has already been sent by the Europeans and the Japanese to analyze its orbit, but it remains to be seen what exactly it will be able to reveal to us.
