Sentences with phrase «in polar craters»
Among them: How do the materials trapped in polar craters arrive on the moon?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ Not exact matches
Many scientists think these permanently shadowed regions, such as the floors on impact craters in the Moon's polar regions, could hold large deposits or water ice.
Now Harmon has carried out a new radar survey of Mercury, which shows that the areas which strongly reflect radio waves match closely the positions of polar craters photographed by Mariner 10, the American spacecraft which flew past Mercury in 1974 and 1975.
The researchers discovered that the reflective features on the map match polar craters seen by Mariner 10 if the positions deduced from the spacecraft are about 1.5 degrees in error.
Because the poles are always at the edge of the sunlit side of Mercury, flat areas receive little solar energy and long shadows keep polar crater floors in perpetual darkness.
The Moon may also have ice hidden in the shadows of its polar craters, says Paige.
A spent rocket stage that NASA sent hurtling into the moon last year in hopes of kicking up water from a polar crater delivered on that mission, revealing that at least a moderate portion of its target was indeed made of ice.
Stone wants to add the missing piece that could support a booming lunar economy: an outpost to mine hydrogen from icy deposits in the moon's polar craters.
«Some of the observed features included ancient river beds, craters, massive extinct volcanoes, canyons, layered polar deposits, evidence of wind - driven deposition and erosion of sediments, weather fronts, ice clouds, localized dust storms, morning fogs and more,» NASA wrote in a summary of the mission.
Most recently, on May 12, Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 captured the surface of Mars in stunning detail, revealing russet deserts pockmarked with craters and bright frosty polar caps shrouded in a thin haze of clouds.
The image, captured when Mars was just 50 million miles from Earth — a mere stone's throw away in the cosmic scale of things — shows russet Martian deserts pockmarked with craters and bright frosty polar caps shrouded, in some regions, in a thin haze of clouds.
Scientists thought most of Vesta outside the south polar region might be flat like the Moon, yet some of the craters outside that region formed on very steep slopes and have nearly vertical sides, with landslides often occurring in the regolith, the deep layer of crushed rock on the surface.
On March 21, 2012, the MESSENGER team also revealed new supporting evidence that many permanently shadowed craters in Mercury's polar regions may harbor water ice insulated with a thin layer of soil or dust, or some other radar - reflecting volatile substance such as sulfur.