Comments on: Water and Mercury do mix!

By: quasidog

quasidog — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:00:53 +0000

OK well to answer my own question .. yes it does have a magnetic field. I Did not know it was so iron rich. One of the later issues of Sky and Telescope Australia had a 4 page article on Mercury’s makeup. Talk about timing ;p

By: Torbjörn Larsson, OM

Torbjörn Larsson, OM — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:21:34 +0000

Not so surprising as solar wind hydrogen sputtering of oxide minerals have been proposed to nicely account for the amount of putative Moon water. Nothing is new under the Sun! [BA pun.]

And of course we have scifi speculating way before this. Stephen Baxter describes the Mercury atmosphere replenishment and water cycle in the chapter “Cilia-of-Gold” in Vacuum Diagrams, here driven by the solar wind (hydrogen/helium atmosphere) and heating (water from rocks), to snow down in a deep polar crater. (And provide a habitat for the descendants of a crashed space ship., such as Cilia-of-Gold.)

Btw, browsing I see that Baxter puts Mercury shrinkage down to closer to two kilometers (in 1997) instead of four, so if there is a future ed he has some revising to do there as well. A recurrent problem of sufficiently “hard” scifi.

I suspect there’s lots of pressure at NASA to report anything that could be water as water.

Perhaps, but that wasn’t the case here. It can be iffy to sort out MA readings, but there is often enough info in them to do it with a reasonable likelihood for the result. It isn’t different from other pattern matching for spectra, genomes, et cetera, YMMV.

By: Jarrad

Jarrad — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:09:27 +0000

oh goodness. just wait until hoagland gets wind of this…

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:11:24 +0000

I suspect there’s lots of pressure at NASA to report anything that could be water as water. The PR staff hate publishing reports that say “it could be water or chlorine, who the hell knows?”.

By: jest

jest — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:02:28 +0000

Well, since the discovery of asteroids with moons, I think there has had to be a lot of rethinking as far as what we actually know about the Solar system is concerned. The science is there to learn though, and 2008 will indeed be quite a great year of discovery.

By: quasidog

quasidog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:29:06 +0000

The obvious thought would be the Sun having blown the water and atmosphere all away by now. It must be being held or protected there by something else like a magnetic field or something. Does Mercury have a magnetic field ? Wouldn’t it’s extremely low mass fail to hold any form of atmosphere together ? Really strange.

By: jest

jest — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:49:50 +0000

There goes Mercury, trying to steal Mars’ thunder.

Don’t shoot the MESSENGER. lol.

(I honestly couldn’t help it)