Water Ice May Exist on Mercury according to NASA Messenger Spacecraft Data

NASA has just reported that its Messenger spacecraft currently on a mission to study the planet Mercury may have detected the possibility of water ice on the planet. While the news may be hard to imagine given that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, scientists believe that the new data may help confirm a long-held hypothesis that large amounts of water ice and other frozen volatile materials exist within the permanently shadowed polar craters on the rocky planet.

“The new data indicate the water ice in Mercury’s polar regions, if spread over an area the size of Washington, D.C., would be more than 2 miles thick,” said David Lawrence, a MESSENGER participating scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and lead author of one of three papers describing the findings.

According to scientists, it is the tilt of Mercury’s rotational axis at less than 1 degree which results in pockets at the planet’s poles that never see sunlight. This information led to the theory that there might be water ice trapped at Mercury’s poles.

NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft has been studying Mercury in unprecedented detail since entering orbit in March 2011. The new observations from MESSENGER, which include measurements of excess hydrogen at Mercury’s north pole, support the idea that ice is the major constituent of Mercury’s north polar deposits. According to NASA, the recent measurements also reveal that ice is exposed at the surface in the coldest of those deposits, but buried beneath unusually dark material across most of the deposits.

“We estimate from our neutron measurements the water ice lies beneath a layer that has much less hydrogen. The surface layer is between 10 and 20 centimeters [4-8 inches] thick,” Lawrence said.

More information about the Mercury mission is available online via the NASA mission web site at: http://www.nasa.gov/messenger