MESSENGER discovered water ice on Mercury

When it comes to Mercury, the majority represents it as a red-hot small planet, on the surface of which one can see lakes of molten metal. Probably, this idea was promoted by science-fiction writers who have repeatedly described Mercury as a burned daughter of a charcoal, where there is almost nothing, and what is there is melting or burning.

Actually, all that has been said concerns only the side that faces the Sun, on the “night” side the temperature drops to a negative value of minus 180 degrees Celsius.
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Low temperatures are characteristic of craters, where the Sun never looks. Craters were the ones who decided to study using the cameras of the Messenger probe, which has been helping to study Mercury for several years.

So, since 2012, scientists have received photographs of shaded craters in the polar regions of the first planet of the solar system. It was possible to get some information about what is at the bottom of the craters, thanks to scattered radiation inside the crater itself.



It was best to examine Prokofiev's crater (yes, it was in honor of the composer Prokofiev that crater got its name). The study of images using a special algorithm showed that at the bottom there is a material with a high albedo characteristic of water ice. It turned out that there is ice in other craters of Mercury, but there it is covered with bloom, presumably from material with a large amount of organic matter.

Now scientists need to find out how old the ice deposits are - whether water appeared on Mercury billions of years ago, or more recently, by geological time.



It is also interesting that the results suggesting the presence of ice on Mercury were obtained as early as the 90s of the last century. Then the surface of the planet was surveyed using a 70-meter antenna of the Goldstone radio telescope. In the polar regions of the planet radio waves reflected much better than in other places. Now the guess of scientists has been confirmed.

Well, as a bonus, the stereoscopic image of Lermontov crater.



Via + NASA