It is now proven that half of the world's oceans come from outer space.

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  • Samples taken from a sea otter asteroid named Itokawa contain water.
  • Itokawa and other asteroids like this could have brought water to half of the world's oceans when they bombed Earth billions of years ago.
  • Find water on the second most common type of asteroid in the Solar system in fact a "priority focus of exploration" according to one of the members of the team that made the discovery.

Normally, you would not think that water should be fetched from an asteroid, especially from a nominally dry asteroid like Itokawa.

Samples from another asteroid, Ryugu, had almost
no water at all.

In 2005, the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft landed on the Itokawa asteroid (above) and took samples that were sent back to Earth.NASA

Yet two cosmochemists at the
The University of Arizona (ASU) followed their intuition in discovering that Itokawa did not only contain water, but that half of the planet's oceans could be the product of hundreds of similar asteroids.

Until we proposed it, no one thought of looking for water. I am pleased to announce that our intuition has borne fruit.

Maitrayee Bose, Assistant Professor, USS School of Earth and Space Exploration,

Finding water on asteroids is not only about determining the origins of the Earth, but also finding other sources for an increasingly scarce resource on Earth.

This makes these asteroids high priority targets for exploration.

Maitrayee Bose, Assistant Professor, USS School of Earth and Space Exploration,

Itokawa, having been in his
current status for 8 million years, has been subject to multiple impacts, shocks and fragmentations. This, in turn, should increase its temperature to chase the water.

Thus, in order to see exactly the amount of water contained in the sample taken from Itokawa – the first samples of asteroids to return to Earth for examination – the ASU team used a nanoscale ion mass spectrometer (NanoSIMS ).

To the surprise of the team, the results showed that Itokawa samples were unexpectedly rich in water, even if they came from the surface of the asteroid where they were most likely to be damaged. .

The minerals have isotopic compositions of hydrogen that are indistinguishable from the Earth.

Zilliang Jin, Postdoctoral Researcher, ASU Earth and Space School

Itokawa is not unique. According to Maitrayee Bose, one of the authors of the discovery, "S-type asteroids are one of the most common objects of Asteroid belt. In fact, it is the second most common type of asteroid in our solar system.

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