Sentences with phrase «of polar craters»

The Moon may also have ice hidden in the shadows of its polar craters, says Paige.

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.

New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet A NASA spacecraft bolsters the case that ice lines the inside of polar craters on Mercury

MESSENGER's maps of polar craters match up nicely with earlier imagery of the poles, taken by Earth - based radars, which showed anomalously bright features — patches that reflected radio waves much better than the surrounding terrain, just as ice does.

Not exact matches

But some places on Mercury are slightly more stable.Inside polar craters on the diminutive planet are regions that never see the light of day, shaded as they are by the craters» rims.

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.

BEYOND its polar lakes, Saturn's moon Titan has vast expanses of hydrocarbon wetlands, according to a new look at the chilly world's impact craters.

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.

On Tuesday, the team successfully executed the last of seven daring orbit correction maneuvers that kept MESSENGER aloft long enough for the spacecraft's instruments to collect critical information on Mercury's crustal magnetic anomalies and ice - filled polar craters, among other features.

«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.

Impact craters at many latitudes sometimes expose thin ice layers a foot or so beneath Mars» surface.132 «At polar latitudes, as much as 50 percent of the upper meter of soil may be [water] ice.»

The most conspicuous feature on Vesta is a giant impact crater located around its south polar region, which is 310 miles (499 kilometers) across and nearly 12 miles (19 km) deep around a «bull's - eye» central peak rising 11 miles (or 18 km) above the exposed mantle rock of the crater floor — that is characteristic of rock rebounding from an impact.

Vesta's south polar basin is dominated by two overlapping craters, where the younger Rheasilvia impact obliterated most of the slightly smaller Veneneia crater about a billion years ago (more).