Water on Mercury!

NASA, even the modern, financially eviscerated  version of NASA, continues to make mind  boggling discoveries, one after another after another.  In today’s discovery, there is water on Mercury!  Well, ice, which surprised  me just as much.

So, I typed in “water on Mercury,” clicked images, and this is what I got.

See, I always figured that Mercury, being the closest planet to the sun, would also be the hottest, the kind of  place where if you got too close to it you would suddenly burst into flames like an overextended marshmallow and  melt into nothingness before you could say shvetz, which is actually much quicker than saying “Jack Robinson” or even “Bob’s your uncle,” so score one for the Czechs there.

Truth is, that’s Venus I’m thinking about because Venus actually has an  atmosphere,  not a very nice one but, nonetheless, it’s an atmosphere and that traps the heat  so Venus is permanently hotter than an  actual  fire on earth.  Mercury,  having pretty close to no  atmosphere  at all, gets really  hot on the side that’s facing the sun when it’s facing the sun (i.e. daytime) and then super cold at night.

At the poles, though, because Mars doesn’t tilt hardly at all (Earth does, which explains the seasons), the sun is virtually never seen, so it’s been super cold like forever.  There, there is ice.  It’s not  as if we’re going to send  up colonists any time soon, we’ve barely got  a toehold on Antarctica and this is a whole hell of a lot colder and there are no cute penguins, but it’s still a pretty amazing discovery.  You could chalk up my not knowing about the lack of atmosphere and tiltillation just to my ignorance of local affairs, but the ice is a totally new thing.

Speaking of Antarctica, I flipped over to this article after reading about Mercury  and from the headline I was  hoping they’d have discovered some extraterrestrial life form (perhaps “hope” is the wrong word,  in view of every science fiction monster movie ever),  but no, it was more just about the drilling through the ice and the fact that this lake was sealed off for thousands of years and  they still found microbial life so it proves that life can sustain itself  damned near anywhere there is water.

Why not Mercury?