Ever since the 1970s, when NASA's Mariner 10 reached Mercury, scientists have been intrigued by the phenomenon of the planet's shrinkage due to its core
lander is, it has been found that 2% of that sample by volume is water, and the expectation is that it would be like this all across the planet. so that s the big surprise. jon: they should have sent curiosity up there with a divining rod, and maybe they could find some serious amounts of water underground. i suppose that s possible. i mean, i m jesting here, but i suppose it s possible that there is, you know, there are serious deposits of subsurface water. well, the real expectation, jon, or the real knowledge, i should say, is that there is plenty of water frozen into the martian soil as subsurface water. we can think of this in terms of the earth analogy of perma frost in the bow lahr regions of our polar regions of our planet. this is the same situation for mars. it has been identified by radar studies of the planet from orbit that if you look down at the northern hemisphere of mars, there is an enormous amount of water frozen into the surface. the question is has that water