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Scientists at NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission proved soon after the arrival on this near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu, that it was carrying hydrated minerals.
Potential explorers have high hopes that water caches scattered throughout the solar system will fuel future rockets.
In new estimates, scientists have looked at the amount of water that might exist, looking more closely at near-Earth asteroids as a potential resource. Astronomers have spotted nearly 20,000 such rocks in space, and we have even observed a handful of them: the Japanese Hayabusa mission2 and NASA 's OSIRIS – REx mission are currently gravitating around the world. such an object. Not all of them carry water, but some have it.
"We know that there are minerals containing water in asteroids.We know that meteorites have fallen to the ground," said lead author Andrew Rivkin, a specialist in planetary sciences at Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, in a statement. "It is also possible that the water of the Earth comes largely from impacts."
Related: The asteroid Bennu had water! NASA's probe makes tantalizing discoveries
In addition to the scientific will to understand how life began on Earth, mapping water through the solar system is important because water – which can be split into hydrogen and oxygen – could also be used to make rocket fuel. If this scenario became commonplace, prices for round-trip space travel would be significantly reduced, as rockets leaving Earth would no longer need to be powerful enough to lift the weight of their fuel. .
To make their calculations, the team relied on ground observations made by telescope of these asteroids. But these observations are tricky because the signature of water in the Earth 's atmosphere can interfere with asteroid measurements. The team therefore used a slightly different signature – a signature that does not actually represent water but was found only in conjunction with the signature that represents it.
Combining these observations with other measurements as well as data on meteorites who fell from asteroids on Earth, the team calculated a baseline estimate of the amount of water that can be trapped inside asteroids close to the Earth. According to this estimate, there could be between 400 and 1200 billion liters of water distributed among these rocks of space.
Ideally, the team would like to perform similar calculations from data collected in space, where the Earth's atmosphere will not interfere with the direct signature of the water. But these measures would be based on the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently scheduled for 2021.
The research is described in a document published in December in the journal JGR Planets.
Original article on Space.com.
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