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MESSENGER Probe Finds Strong Evidence of Ice On Mercury
The Bad Astronomer writes "Just in time for the holiday season, the NASA space probe MESSENGER appears to have all but confirmed the existence of ice at Mercury's north pole. Ice has long been suspected to be hiding in permanently shadowed areas in deep craters at the planet's pole, but new data show several converging lines of evidence (thermal and visible light mapping, radar, neutron emission) that as much as a trillion tons of ice may be buried just centimeters deep under the surface. Scientists also see evidence of organic (carbon-based) molecules as well. That's not life, but it's more of an indication that volatile compounds can exist on the solar system's innermost planet."
Further, astroengine writes "New results from the MESSENGER spacecraft not only confirm that the planet closest to the sun has ice inside shaded craters near the north pole, but that a thin layer of very dark organic material seems to be covering a good part of the frozen water. Both likely arrived via comets or asteroids millions — or hundreds of millions — of years ago."
It would be expensive, because of the high delta-V required to match Mercury's orbit around the sun, but we should really get a lander down there.
One that can take core samples, and that has a sophisticated chemistry lab.
Or perhaps several landers / core samplers, with the ability to send samples to a central lab module.
The ice, and the carbon material covering it, would contain a history of comet impacts, captured dust samples, and other events.
...oh, wait. I thought it said mice on Mercury. My bad.
The article focuses on life, but perhaps ice also means Mercury could harbor human colonies. Most people think of Mercury as big oven, but there are probably Goldilocks areas near such "ice craters" where the temperature is just right, and near water sources to boot. It could end up being a better place for colonization than Mars because Mars' ice is mostly in cold areas only.
I just wonder about solar radiation.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA: "Maybe the probe carried the ice from Earth and contaminated Mercury."
Probe: "Hell no, I'm just the MESSENGER!"
Table-ized A.I.
Martian Martian Martian!
Table-ized A.I.
You mean the promise that they would announce it at a conference in December (I believe the 8th or so)? You'll have to chill a few days as we are still in November.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It is (minus radiation concerns) theoretically doable.
A couple things in Mercury's favor. First, Mercury has an "earth-like" magnetic field (unlike venus and mercury). Second the "tilt" is pretty small so, near the poles you could probably reasonably straddle the day/night region.
The big down side, (that others have mentioned), is you got this big gravity pit near you and no atmosphere for braking, so getting stuff from Earth to Mercury is gonna be much more expensive than other places in the solar system.
from nasa.gov:
"NASA will provide a Curiosity update at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, at the American Geophysical Union. Rumors of major new findings at this early stage are incorrect.
The news conference will discuss Curiosity's use of instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. Audio and visuals from the briefing will be available via UStream."
looks like what they found turned out to be something else.
I don't get it. If gravity is less then earths, you would think that stuff would fly higher and farther since it doesn't have as much gravity to hold it down.
The tactic of slamming something into a comet worked because the comet had basically no real gravity to keep debris from flying, where mercury has quite a bit more gravity. While it is only about 1/3 of that of earth, the implication isn't that we can pull this trick off on Earth. Debris from a comet will fly in a fairly straight path out of the point of impact, but debris on Mercury will fly in a more parabolic path.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
While Mercury does have a magnetic field, I normally don't see it referred to as Earth-like. Usually there are three categories of interaction between the solar wind and a planet: like Earth and Jupiter with a large, well developed magnetosphere, like the moon and Mars where there is virtually no magnetism and it is all interaction of the solar wind directly with surface or atmosphere, and then like Mercury. Mercury's field is about 1% as strong as Earth, which can mostly form a magnetosphere, but in the process of solar wind moving past, it can distort and disturb the magnetosphere such that sections of Mercury's surface are directly exposed to solar wind. So while it would be better than nothing, there would still be random exposure. And it doesn't help that its marginal nature makes it more difficult to model and predict compared to the other more extreme examples.