How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?

Eke, Vincent R.; Lawrence, David J.; Teodoro, Luis F.A.

Abstract

An estimate is made of the thickness of the radar-bright deposits in craters near to Mercury’s north pole. 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 onboard the MESSENGER spacecraft. This produces a catalogue of 663 craters with diameters exceeding 4 km, northwards of latitude +55∘. 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 ∼ 3 × 1015 kg.

Citation

Eke, V. R., Lawrence, D. J., & Teodoro, L. F. (2017). How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?. Icarus, 284, 407-415. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2016.12.001

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 5, 2016
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Dec 19, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 5, 2017
• Journal: Icarus
• Print ISSN: 0019-1035
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 284
• Pages: 407-415
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2016.12.001
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1368017