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Cool stuff about mercury (thanks brian) and what an oddity that even though it's so close to the sun that it still has ice at it's poles.
It has ice at its poles because of its extremely slow rotational period. Mercury's day is longer than its year. Mercury orbits the sun in 87.969 days, and rotates once about its axis every 115.88 days.
So for almost three months only one side of Mercury is facing the sun. Which causes the side facing away from the sun to reach temperatures of -279.4ºF and the side facing the sun to reach temperatures of 800.6ºF.
Only those areas that are in perpetual shadow at the poles would have any evidence of water-ice. Without an atmosphere any sunlight would have caused water-ice to evaporate long ago.
It has ice at its poles because of its extremely slow rotational period. Mercury's day is longer than its year. Mercury orbits the sun in 87.969 days, and rotates once about its axis every 115.88 days.
So for almost three months only one side of Mercury is facing the sun. Which causes the side facing away from the sun to reach temperatures of -279.4ºF and the side facing the sun to reach temperatures of 800.6ºF.
Only those areas that are in perpetual shadow at the poles would have any evidence of water-ice. Without an atmosphere any sunlight would have caused water-ice to evaporate long ago.
Thanks for clearing all that up for us
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