Mercury’s Polar Water Ice Deposits 水星极区水冰沉积物

摘要：For over 50 years, the scientific literature has contained speculation about the possible presence of water ice in permanently shaded regions in Mercury’s polar craters. The presence, or otherwise, of volatile molecules might help us to understand the delivery of water to the inner solar system. I will review the development of our understanding of the water ice deposits in these permanently shaded regions, including radar measurements as well as data from a variety of instruments on the MESSENGER spacecraft. I will describe some recent work to constrain the depth of the deposits using data from MESSENGER’s Laser Altimeter. This involved defining a set of polar craters using a new automated crater-finding algorithm applied to the digital elevation model. The departures from axisymmetry in these polar craters were then used to constrain the deposit thickness to be <150 m.

报告人简介：Dr. Vincent R. Eke is a reader in the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics,
Durham University, UK. He was educated at the University of Cambridge (Physics and Theoretical Physics) and Durham University, receiving a Ph.D. in cosmology in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a postdoc in Oxford University and Cambridge University, and from 1999 to 2001 he was a research associate at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona. From 2001 to 2009, he held a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Durham University. Since 2009, he has been working at Durham University as a lecturer, and since 2010 as a reader. His research interests fall into four distinct areas: numerical simulations of the growth of structure in the Universe, the comparison of data from galaxy surveys with numerical models of the galaxy distribution, the application of image reconstruction techniques to a variety of astronomical problems, and analysis of remote sensing data in planetary science. He has published more than 60 papers in international journals, and these papers have been cited over 7500 times. He also serves as a frequent referee for several prestigious international journals, such as Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Icarus and Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets.