While everyone had their heads all up in Curiosity’s ass, Messenger was off doing its own thaannngg…
Mercury is as cold as ice.
Indeed, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, possesses a lot of ice, scientists working with NASA’s Messenger spacecraft reported on Thursday.
Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, said there was enough ice there to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.
That is a counterintuitive discovery for a place that also ranks among the hottest in the solar system. At noon at the equator on Mercury, the temperature can hit 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
But near Mercury’s poles, deep within craters where the Sun never shines, temperatures dip to as cold as minus 370.
what’s interesting is that with each of those extremes it suggest that there will be places on mercury that are suitable for human life somewhere in between.
i also read that there was organic matter inside the ice which is even more interesting.
“Stable” for human life in the same sense that the moon is “stable”… high radiation is just one of the many obstacles to having humans near Mercury let alone on it’s surface.
Organic matter isn’t that unusual. It just means they found a good about of carbon which we find on meteorites all the time.