Probe reveals organics, ice on Mercury

No organic material found on Mars yet: NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov 30, (RTRS): Despite searing daytime temperatures, Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, has ice and frozen organic materials inside permanently shadowed craters in its north pole, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Earth-based telescopes have been compiling evidence for ice on Mercury for 20 years, but the finding of organics was a surprise, say researchers with NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, the first probe to orbit Mercury.

Both ice and organic materials, which are similar to tar or coal, were believed to have been delivered millions of years ago by comets and asteroids crashing into the planet.

“It’s not something we expected to see, but then of course you realize it kind of makes sense because we see this in other places,” such as icy bodies in the outer solar system and in the nuclei of comets, planetary scientist David Paige, with the University of California, Los Angeles, told Reuters.

Unlike NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, which will be sampling rocks and soils to look for organic long before that. They focused on the western end of the Grand Canyon occupied today by the Hualapai Reservation, which owns the Skywalk attraction, a horseshoe-shaped glass bridge that extends from the canyon’s edge.

To come up with the age, the team crushed rocks collected from the bottom of the canyon to analyze a rare type of mineral called apatite. The mineral contains traces of radioactive elements that release helium during decay, allowing researchers to calcu- materials directly, the MESSENGER probe bounces laser beams, counts particles, measures gamma rays and collects other data remotely from orbit.

The discoveries of ice and organics, painstakingly pieced together for more than a year, are based on computer models, laboratory experiments and deduction, not direct analysis.

“The explanation that seems to fit all the data is that it’s organic material,” said lead MESSENGER scientist Sean Solomon, with Columbia University in New York.

Added Paige, “It’s not just a crazy hypothesis. No one has got anything else that seems to fit all the observations better.”

Scientists believe the organic material, which is about twice as dark as most of Mercury’s surface, was mixed in with comet- or asteroid-delivered ice eons ago.

The ice vaporized, then re-solidified where it was colder, leaving dark deposits on the surface. Radar imagery shows the dark patches subside at the coldest parts of the crater, where ice can exist on the surface. late the passage of time since the canyon eroded.

Their interpretation: The western Grand Canyon is 70 million years old and was likely shaped by an ancient river that coursed in the opposite direction of the west-flowing Colorado.

Lead researcher Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado Boulder realizes not everyone will accept this alternative view, which minimizes the role of the Colorado River.

“Arguments will continue over the

Also: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla: NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has completed its first soil analysis of the Red Planet with no sign of organic material, the US space agency said on Thursday.

“Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect,” NASA said in a statement. “At this point, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.”

The $2 billion nuclear-powered rover landed inside a giant impact basin near the Martian equator in August to look for signs the planet most like Earth in the solar system has or ever had the ingredients to support life. It is NASA’s first astrobiology mission since the 1970s- era Viking probes.

So far, Curiosity has found evidence of an ancient riverbed, monitored swirling dust storms, measured radiation levels and analyzed its first sample of Martian sand, the results of which will be released at an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco next week. age of Grand Canyon, and I hope our study will stimulate more work to decipher the mysteries,” Flowers said in an email.

It’s not the first time that Flowers has dug up evidence for an older Grand Canyon. In 2008, she authored a study that suggested part of the eastern Grand Canyon, where most tourists go, formed 55 million years ago. Another study published that same year by a different group of researchers put the age of the western section at 17 million years old.