Here you go, folks – the first image from last night's Mercury flyby by BepiColombo, ESA & JAXA's mission to our innermost planet.
The south pole is near the top of the image, right at the terminator between night & day, where there a some craters that never see sunlight & may even hold ice.
This is just a first teaser image – we'll be publishing some very exciting images from the closest part of the flyby later on today
To help you with your orientation, this version of the image shows the location of the south pole, marked with a yellow dot.
Given that the planet reaches temperatures of up to 450ºC in the sunlight, it's remarkable to think that there could actually be ice in those shadowed craters. But radar reflections from Arecibo do suggest that might be possible.
Two additional interesting points about that possible south pole ice, IIRC:
1. One thought is that it was has been delivered to Mercury relatively recently by impacts of comets on the surface;
2. It can only survive in a deeply shadowed crater because the obliquity of Mercury, i.e. the tilt of its rotation axis away from perpendicular to the ecliptic, is close to zero. That means there's no seasonal effect in the way our north & south poles have, due to Earth's tilt.
@markmccaughrean "possible _water in the_ south pole"?
@markmccaughrean I was making sure whether you had an error or my English is not good enough. you wrote "that possible south pole", but the a. and b. points seemed to talk about the possible water in it from the previous toot.
@mdione Apologies – I've been awake for >24 hours & really beginning to fade. You were absolutely right – I've fixed that typo. Thank you