Inside Mercury’s Raditladi and Eminescu craters, MESSENGER images revealed glacier-like flows that may consist of salts and other volatile-rich material preserved for more than a billion years—raising the possibility of buried niches analogous to salt deposits inhabited by extremophiles in Earth’s Atacama Desert.

MESSENGER mapped glacier-like runouts and hollows in two Mercury craters; salt-flow models explain their form and longevity, but neither composition nor habitability has been demonstrated. The post Inside Mercury’s Raditladi and Eminescu craters, MESSENGER im…