ASTROPHYSICS

The large amount of data returned by several space missions to the terrestrial planets has greatly improved our understanding of the similarities and differences between the innermost planets of our Solar System. Nevertheless, their interior remains poorly known since most of the data is related to surface processes. In the absence of direct data of the interior evolution of terrestrial planets, numerical simulations of mantle convection are an important mean to reconstruct the thermal and chemical history of the interior of the Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars. In this project, run on Hornet of HLRS, researchers used the mantle convection code Gaia to model the thermal evolution of terrestrial planets and in particular the early stage…

Scientists of the German Aerospace Center Berlin (DLR) exploited the computing capacity of the petascale system Hornet of HLRS to study the convective dynamics and evolution of planetary interiors. The goal of the large-scale simulation project MATHECO (MAntle THErmo-chemical COnvection Simulations), which scaled to 54,000 compute cores of the supercomputer Hornet, was to gain further insights into the cooling history of planets and its influences on volcanic and tectonic surface processes.