Eke, Vincent R. and Lawrence, David J. and Teodoro, Luis F. A. (2017) 'How thick are Mercury's polar water ice deposits?', Icarus., 284 . pp. 407-415.
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.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Full text: | (AM) Accepted Manuscript Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download PDF (3305Kb) |
| Status: | Peer-reviewed |
| Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2016.12.001 |
| Publisher statement: | © 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/ |
| Date accepted: | 01 December 2016 |
| Date deposited: | 19 December 2016 |
| Date of first online publication: | 05 December 2016 |
| Date first made open access: | 05 December 2017 |
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