Mercury Flyby 2 Options

[Holder of the Tw...]

It is time for this new topic.

Round Two

[CAP-Team]

I think you'll have to wait for that till the orbital insertion.

[JRehling]

The flybys are all near-equatorial and, moreover, they are so close to the planet that the poles are permanently over the horizon near C/A.

Yet moreover, the interesting thing about the poles, that the bottoms of the craters may contain ice, is by definition something that can't be observed in sunlight, because they're never in sunlight. So far as Mariner 10 showed, there was nothing unusual in the visible areas of the poles.

The interesting thing will be to see the elemental spectroscopy of the north pole where any hydrogen would make a strong signal (as it did on the Moon and Mars). That will have to wait for the orbital mission. The other possibility is that some other element like sulfur is the culprit. I'm betting on ice, though, which would mean that every body in the inner solar system besides Venus has water ice at its poles. Come to think of it, it's probably about a sweep in the outer solar system, too, besides Io.