NASA dispatched the Curiosity rover to Mars to look for organics, but a probe orbiting Mercury has beaten it to the punch.
New results from the MESSENGER spacecraft not only confirm that the planet closest to the sun has ice inside shaded craters near the north pole, but that a thin layer of very dark organic material seems to be covering a good part of the frozen water.
Both likely arrived via comets or asteroids millions -- or hundreds of millions -- of years ago.
BIG PIC: Dark Shadows Freeze Mercury's North Pole
Unlike Curiosity, which will be directly sampling Martian rocks and soils to look for signs of organic material, MESSENGER bounces laser beams and counts neutrons and gamma rays to collect information remotely about chemical elements on Mercury’s surface.
The information is correlated with detailed topographical and temperature maps, laboratory tests and computer models and then compared with candidate materials to find the best match for the observed conditions.
