There has been a lot of excitement recently in the scientific world. NASA has made two huge discoveries within a week of each other. In case you didn’t already know, ice—yes, the same ice that’s in your refrigerator at home—has been discovered on Mercury, the planet in our solar system closest to the sun.
The frozen water was found in areas of Mercury’s north pole that are always in shadows, basically craters from comet impacts and asteroid strikes. Scientists also think that the south pole contains ice also, though there isn’t any data to support it because Messenger orbits a lot closer to the north pole than the south.
For more than 20 years, radar measurements of Mercury taken from Earth have implied that there is ice on or around Mercury’s poles. Now scientists can be certain thanks to Messenger, which was launched in 2004 and went into orbit around the planet one-and-a-half years ago
NASA hopes to continue observations of Mercury into the better part of next year.
If that fantastic information isn’t enough, organic compounds have been discovered on Mars.
From its main excavation location on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover has for the first time sampled the soil on Mars. Although NASA has not yet found any life, it did find a complex chemical mixture of water, sulfur, and chlorine-containing materials as well as small amounts of organic compounds that could help sustain very simple life.
Curiosity is the first Mars rover able to scoop and analyze soil from the Red Planet. The first-ever tests came from a drift of windblown dust and sand called the “Rocknest’’ inside Gale Crater.
These Martian tests have demonstrated the rover’s scientific capabilities to analyze rock samples, something that’s expected to continue for the next two years.
Though it’s nothing like the Mars we know from Orson Welles or the Mercury of Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, these discoveries hold hope for the future.