4 ms·
this is about magmatic water, which is stuff trapped underneath the crust in the liquid planetary interior. you'd hardly call the stuff liquid since it's going
by terramars 13y ago
this is about magmatic water, which is stuff trapped underneath the crust in the liquid planetary interior. you'd hardly call the stuff liquid since it's going to manifest itself as hydroxide or other hydrated minerals once released to the surface. just like the polar region solar wind water / hydrogen, you'd have to actually mine the damn stuff in order to make use of it. seeing as rocks have a ton of oxygen in them normally, this is really only significant as a source of hydrogen. permanently shadowed ice "may" be significant as a source of water in and of itself, but even still you've got huge technical challenges trying to get at it (care to operate in a 30K environment).
anyways, mercury has way better ice deposits than the moon does and no one cares.
EDIT: oh yeah the apollo missions found hydrated volcanic glass beads that were ~15ppm water, i'm not sure how this finding relates to that one but don't get the idea that the quantities involved will be large on a local scale though they're probably much higher than that.
- iwwr 13y agoMerely getting to orbit Mercury is more energy-expensive than leaving the solar system altogether, then landing in a high-gravity environment and without an atmosphere. Mercury is not easy to get to.
- terramars 13y agoYes I agree. I did see something very interesting a couple months ago about favorable temperatures in subterranean donuts near the Mercury poles. Regardless, Moon and Mercury are both "high gravity" - L4/L5 or cis-lunar asteroid stations are clearly the way to go. Only things the moon is good for that asteroids aren't better for is He3 and astronomy.
- m_mueller 13y agoI'm trying to wrap my head around this. Is it really more energy intensive to slow down in mercury's orbit, than escaping the sun's gravity well? If that's true, can I inflect that the delta between mercury and earth is larger than the delta between earth and infinity, i.e. we are 'more than halfway out' of sun's gravity well in terms of gravitational energy levels?
- T-hawk 13y agoYes. Check the orbital velocities involved. Mercury is 48 km/sec, Earth is 30, and an object at infinity would be zero. Kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared. Square the orbital velocities and you see the Mercury-Earth energy delta is larger than Earth-infinity.
- m_mueller 13y agoThanks. Makes sense of course.