

NASA Probe Finds Ice and Organics on Mercury - dfischer
http://blogs.discovery.com/inscider/2012/11/nasa-mercury-announcement.html#mkcpgn=fbsci1

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stcredzero
100 billion tons of water covered with organics has just made the Mercury
polar regions two of the most desirable pieces of real estate in the solar
system after Earth and Mars. The water would be helpful for establishing
colonies and industry (like producing solar panels from silicon) as well as
being a valuable resource in its own right. If there are enough organics of
the right kind, they could be used to make thin films, possibly allowing solar
sails to be made in-situ.

Combining this with the abundant energy and the advantageous combination of
being low in the Sun's gravity well, this makes Mercury a prime location both
for energy-intensive industry and export to the rest of the solar system. You
see, the deeper in a gravity well you apply thrust, the more delta-v you get
from it. Since the Sun is the biggest gravity well in the solar system, and
since solar sails have their highest thrust near the sun, you get lots of
highly-leveraged thrust for free, so the location is very advantageous for
export.

I think one day Mercury is going to be in the business of packaging energy as
antimatter and shipping it all over the solar system.

~~~
AngryParsley
Thrust may be more efficient, but you need a _lot_ more of it to get out of
the gravity well. Delta-v from LEO to Mercury is around 18km/s. That's LEO,
not the Earth's surface. If you want to travel from the ground, you'll need
another 9-10km/s. Getting there and back would take enormous amounts of fuel.
To put it another way: from the Earth, escaping the sun's gravity completely
(going interstellar) takes less delta-v than a one-way trip to or from
Mercury.

It's more cost-effective to build bigger collectors closer to Earth.

~~~
stcredzero
_It's more cost-effective to build bigger collectors closer to Earth._

Mercury would be exporting high energy manufactured goods to the rest of the
solar system excluding earth. The ground<->LEO energy loss would make lots of
trade prohibitive. The rest of the solar system would be different.

~~~
AngryParsley
What? A one-way trip to Mercury takes three times as much energy as a trip to
LEO and back. If you need energy to produce goods, building power plants on
Earth or Moon make much more sense.

Your ideas belong in a soft sci-fi story. The economics and orbital mechanics
simply do not work out in favor of a Mercury colony.

~~~
stcredzero
_A one-way trip to Mercury takes three times as much energy as a trip to LEO
and back._

We'd be exporting things/energy _from_ Mercury, not to it, and the energy for
the export would also be supplied by the sun through the use of solar sails.

 _If you need energy to produce goods, building power plants on Earth or Moon
make much more sense._

Maybe. I can see how the difficulty of coping with being as close to the sun
as Mercury would raise expenses. With selling antimatter, you wouldn't be
selling energy so much as energy in a highly concentrated package. Economies
of scale are going to come into play in an industry like that, and the ability
to harvest more concentrated energy with mostly in-situ resources could be a
big advantage. You'd have to bring resources up from the moon and from the
asteroids to make the infrastructure to do that profitably in the vicinity of
Earth. If you wouldn't have to do that for Mercury, it might be viable.

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anoved
Emily Lakdawalla has posted a good explanatory write-up, with more details on
the methodology and background on the research, at the Planetary Society blog:
[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2012/1129120...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2012/11291206-mercury-polar-ice.html)

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TallGuyShort
Can someone explain why the discovery of ice and organics on Mars and Mercury
such a surprise? If the prevailing opinion in science is that life formed
spontaneously on Earth because the required chemistry was already present,
doesn't it follow that similar compounds would be found through out the solar
system? I get that each planet has a dramatically different composition in
terms of what it primarily consists of, but I would expect traces of things
like water and simple organic compounds to be found in various concentrations
through out the solar system, no?

~~~
incision
>Can someone explain why the discovery of ice and organics on Mars and Mercury
such a surprise?

It isn't a surprise, the hypothesis has been around for a long time, this is
just new supporting evidence.

>If the prevailing opinion in science is that life formed spontaneously on
Earth because the required chemistry was already present, doesn't it follow
that similar compounds would be found through out the solar system?

The big difference with Earth is position and the presence of a protective
magnetosphere [1].

1: [http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2001/as...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/)

~~~
sliverstorm
Additionally, enough gravity to maintain an atmosphere. Mars isn't in a
terrible spot, but it can't hold on to water vapor, oxygen, etc.

~~~
stcredzero
Agri-domes and underground habitats. I think that would be a cool world to
live on.

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ivanb
Ice on Mercury, the closes planet to the Sun? Unbelievable. Indeed Wikipedia
tells that the temperature gradient on the planet ranges "from a very cold 100
K at night to a very hot 700 K during the day." I used to think that Mercury
is a half-molten radioactive hell.

For me organic material is not that exciting. Such substances as methane seem
to be everywhere in space.

~~~
incision
>Ice on Mercury, the closes planet to the Sun? Unbelievable.

Amazing what an atmosphere, or the lack thereof, can do for a planet.

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xpose2000
For the organic material to be on top of the frozen ice is a fascinating find.
I wonder what's below that? I suppose any permanently shaded areas on that
planet have huge potential.

~~~
lmm
Organic material could easily just mean some kind of light oil (even gasoline
floats on water)

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ChuckMcM
I've always wondered if something like the Chixclub (sp?) asteroid impact
could impart enough energy to eject water and soil to escape velocity. Clearly
easier to do at an angle than straight into the ground but the interesting
calculation would be this, what size rock would have to collide with the ocean
at what level to knock a chunk of the earth to Mercury ? We know this sort of
transfer takes place since we've got meteorites that are from Mars so
something hit Mars and knocked bits of it here.

Surely there is an astrophysicist in the house who could tell me if this is
possible or just crazy talk.

~~~
arethuza
I'm pretty sure that KSR mentions the possibility of some of his characters
finding a chunk of Yucatan on Mars - so its perhaps not completely crazy...

Some impact events appear to have been a lot larger (and therefore presumably
a lot more energy) than Chicxulub - e.g. the Vredefort Crater in South Africa

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater>

~~~
ChuckMcM
Youza! That is a big hole. Thanks for the link, filed under "things I don't
want to be near when they happen." :-)

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varikin
Is this the first time organic material has been confirmed outside of Earth?

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dimitar
No, it is known for a long time that organic compounds like Methane are found
in the atmospheres of planets and comets.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Alcohol was also found in space: <http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2001/vinylalco/>

~~~
dfischer
That gives me interesting sci-fi imagery. That would be a cool setting for a
pirate/blackmarket trade.

~~~
camus
well , it's not the kind of brewery one wants to ingest ,but yeah , i hear you
;)

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loboman
Is this the announcement Nasa was talking about, or is this unrelated?

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themstheones
The hyped announcement was about Mars, and hasn't been released yet.

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ajuc
And has been already debunked :)
<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-377>

