The small obliquity of Mercury and the Moon causes topographic depressions found near their poles to cast highly persistent shadows. In the absence of an atmosphere, these permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) may cold-trap and preserve volatile species, such as water, for billions of years. While on Mercury, observations in radar, surface reflectance, and visible imagery detected pure, glacier-like ice deposits inside most of its north-pole permanent shadows, similar observations conducted on the Moon have found its polar cold-trapped ice is surficial and patchy, and likely mixed-in with the regolith. In the talk, we will review the accumulation and destruction of ice within cold-traps and attempt to resolve the difference between the reservoirs of ice on Mercury and the Moon.

Dr. Lior Rubanenko is a visiting professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. He also leads the Laboratory for Machine-Assisted Planetary Science (i.e., MAPS) as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Technion in Israel.

For the zoom information, please get in touch with Rey Garduño (rgarduno@stanford.edu)