Sodium Enrichment of Mercury's Subsurface Through Diffusion

Abstract

Mercury's surface undergoes large temperature gradients between day and night, which repeats periodically over the same longitudes due to its 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. This effect combined with the orbit's eccentricity, creates hot and cold geographic longitudes. The planet is covered with a highly porous regolith, allowing exospheric atoms to diffuse in depth. By using a 1-D diffusion model, we studied the subsurface precipitation of gas over the cold and hot longitudes to understand gas retention. This work identifies the cold longitudes as favorable regions to form subsurface reservoirs closer to the surface. Moreover, subsurface reservoirs of adsorbates increase two to three times faster over cold longitudes than over hot longitudes, depending on the surface binding energy distribution of the atoms. We suggest that this result may be related to the observation that Mercury's sodium exosphere persists at later local times over the cold pole.