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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

More ice has been found to exist [brown.edu] in permanently shadowed craters and terrain on Mercury's [wikipedia.org] surface:

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters [wiley.com] [DOI: 10.1002/2017GL074723] [DX [doi.org]], adds three new members to the list of craters near Mercury's north pole that appear to harbor large surface ice deposits. But in addition to those large deposits, the research also shows evidence that smaller-scale deposits scattered around Mercury's north pole, both inside craters and in shadowed terrain between craters. Those deposits may be small, but they could add up to a lot more previously unaccounted-for ice.

"The assumption has been that surface ice on Mercury exists predominantly in large craters, but we show evidence for these smaller-scale deposits as well," said Ariel Deutsch, the study's lead author and a Ph.D. candidate at Brown. "Adding these small-scale deposits to the large deposits within craters adds significantly to the surface ice inventory on Mercury."

[...] To seek further evidence that such smaller-scale deposits exist, the researchers looked though the altimeter data in search of patches that were smaller than the big crater-based deposits, but still large enough to resolve with the altimeter. They found four, each with diameters of less than about 5 kilometers. "These four were just the ones we could resolve with the MESSENGER instruments," Deutsch said. "We think there are probably many, many more of these, ranging in sizes from a kilometer down to a few centimeters."

A Mercury Colony? [einstein-schrodinger.com]

Also at the American Geophysical Union [agu.org].

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