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The sun's closest neighbor resembles Earth's moon: Grayscale and barren, covered with craters, and no atmosphere to dull the drastic temperature changes. If you were standing on the surface of Mercury at night, however, you would instantly freeze solid - and when the sun came up you would be cooked at 800°F! The fact that a day on Mercury is almost as long as a year doesn't help matters much, either - it only rotates thrice for every two revolutions around the Sun.
Despite all this, it appears that water may well exist there - as ice.
NASA's Messenger probe has been checking out places where the sun don't shine on Mercury- in the recesses of its enormous impact craters. The reports are in, and researchers now believe they have found water ice lurking in the shadowy depths.
Maria Zuber of MIT told the BBC that researchers are beginning to think that water is common throughout the solar system, not to mention the galaxy. She said the Messenger data is "strengthening the evidence that there is some sort of volatile there, and water-ice seems quite likely."
Messenger is the first probe since the 70's to visit the tiny planet. Read the full article.
