How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?

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

doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2016.12.001

How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?

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

Authors

Dr Vincent Eke v.r.eke@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

David J. Lawrence

Luis F.A. Teodoro

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

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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© 2016 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/