How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?

Abstract

An estimate is made of the thickness of the radar-bright deposits in craters near to the north pole of Mercury. To construct an objective set of craters for this measurement, an automated crater finding algorithm is developed and applied to a digital elevation model based on data from the Mercury Laser Altimeter on board the MESSENGER spacecraft. This produces a catalogue of 663 craters with diameters exceeding 4 km, northwards of latitude +55 degrees. A subset of 12 larger, well-sampled and fresh polar craters are selected to search for correlations between topography and radar same-sense backscatter cross-section. It is found that the typical excess height associated with the radar-bright regions within these fresh polar craters is (50+/-35)m. This puts an approximate upper limit on the total polar water ice deposits on Mercury of 3e15 kg.

arXiv comment10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Icarus

References in corpus (4)

• Cometary Origin of the Zodiacal Cloud and Carbonaceous Micrometeorites
• Building Terrestrial Planets
• Water Delivery and Giant Impacts in the 'Grand Tack' Scenario
• The effect of craters on the lunar neutron flux

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• Constraining the Formation of the Four Terrestrial Planets in the Solar System
• Terrestrial Planet Formation: Constraining the Formation of Mercury
• Formation of Terrestrial Planets
• Exogenous delivery of water to Mercury
• Guided Self Replicating Factory for Colonization of Solar System