The process of writing posts for TYWKIWDBI keeps driving me to various corners of the internet, where I encounter things that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t even imagine. As a child I was told that one of the special features of our planet was the availability of abundant water. Later I came to understand via reading (and movies) that there are extraterrestrial “water worlds,” including within our own solar system (Europa has more water than Earth does).
None of that previous knowledge prepared me for the shock of reading recently that NASA has found good evidence for water ice on the planet Mercury.
“The yellow regions in many of the craters mark locations that show evidence for water ice, as detected by Earth-based radar observations from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. MESSENGER has collected compelling new evidence that the deposits are indeed water ice, including imaging within the permanently shaded interiors of some of the craters, such as …