{"id":258,"date":"2008-02-21T00:24:31","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T05:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=258"},"modified":"2008-03-05T09:40:24","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T14:40:24","slug":"258","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=258","title":{"rendered":"They came from Mercury&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/mercurian-meterorite.jpg\" title=\"Mercurian meteorite\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/mercurian-meterorite.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"Mercurian meteorite\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astrobods have found several dozen meteorites from Mars and the Moon that have made their way to Earth over the years. These rocks were launched during major impacts there.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s unlikely that we&#8217;ll ever see a meteorite from Venus arrive on Earth: the Venusian atmosphere is just too thick. But what of Mercury?<\/p>\n<p>According to Brett Gladman  from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Mercurian meteorites may be an order of magnitude more common on Earth than we thought.<\/p>\n<p>He and a pal say Mercury is the only planet where impact speeds are routinely 5 to 20 times greater than the escape speed.<\/p>\n<p>So they calculated the percentage of rock likely to escape from Mercury towards Earth after an impact. It turns out that up to 5% of rocks leaving Mercury with speeds greater than 9 km per second could reach Earth within 30 million years.<\/p>\n<p>So Mercurian meteorites probably arrive here at about half the rate of rocks from Mars.<\/p>\n<p>That means that somewhere on Earth, in somebody&#8217;s meteorite collection there lies a little bit of Mercury. Get looking!<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0801.4038\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0801.4038<\/a>: Mercurian Impact Ejecta: Meteorites and Mantle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astrobods have found several dozen meteorites from Mars and the Moon that have made their way to Earth over the years. These rocks were launched during major impacts there. It&#8217;s unlikely that we&#8217;ll ever see a meteorite from Venus arrive on Earth: the Venusian atmosphere is just too thick. But what of Mercury? According to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hellraisin","category-mountain-climbin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}