More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid

Matt_dk writes "For the first time, astronomers have confirmed that an asteroid contains frozen water on its surface. Analysis of asteroid 24 Themis shows evidence of water ice along with organic compounds widespread across the surface. The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet."

Comments

Re:Rain happens when God cries

[BadAnalogyGuy]

God wears a gown, you moron. Those farts aren't going anywhere.

Re:Where?

[fyngyrz]

Where did all that water come from originally if we were "seeded" by meteors and such?

Hydrogen and Oxygen. Stellar fusion. Etc. Nothing magical about it; without (yet) knowing the specifics, we can still reasonably intuit the processes at large.

Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[wisebabo]

The Augustine commission reporting to President Obama recommended that we skip LANDING on the Moon and Mars and instead consider progressively deeper space voyages (first to L1 earth moon point, then perhaps L2 earth sun point, then Mars flyby/orbit or asteroid visits). For example astronauts in Mars orbit could send robotic probes to land on Mars which could be much more effective without the 10 minute time lag to earth. (Can you say telepresence?). Visiting comets and asteroids would be a major goal not just for scientific knowledge (and the knowledge as to how to eventually prevent them from hitting us) but ultimately in-situ resource exploitation.

They feel that this approach would lead to "the most steady cadence of steady improvement." and keep us from inconsistent achievements in space (like not leaving earth orbit for 40 years!). Some would say that this approach would be lacking in the photo-ops necessary to maintain interest in the space program (no footprints on Martian soil) but I think there would be plenty of cool vistas (rendezvous with a comet or even orbiting one of the moons of Jupiter assuming they figure out radiation shielding) to keep the taxpayer dollars flowing. The science return would be much greater because it would hopefully utilize both man and machine at their best (robots on one way trips down a gravity well while the humans provide the intuition and flexibility from orbit). If you can figure out radiation shielding and bone loss from zero-g, we could go just about anywhere in the solar system (with a good ion drive and nuclear power plant). Now with the presence of water confirmed on at least (some) of these smaller bodies, they could stay there for long periods of time.

Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[mrsquid0]

The critical finding of the Augustine commission was that NASA is severely underfunded for doing manned spaceflight. If the US wants a human presence in space beyond low Earth orbit we need to be willing the pay the real cost of sending people beyond low Earth orbit. Until that happens any visits to a comet or a Legrange point, or anywhere else further away than the ISS are going to remain a pipe dream, unless if you happen to be Chinese.

Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[Shrike82]

Anybody else find it sort of depressing that our "Voyage to the Stars" is hindered by our invention of currency? Yes, I know that whoever digs materials out of the ground needs paying, and whoever processes them into components needs paying, but it's all very depressing when you thik that we might already have a lunar base and be exploring Mars if it weren't for those damn dollars and pounds holding us back.

Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[MichaelSmith]

Money is just a way of counting resources. Space flight is very expensive however you count it. With companies like SpaceX finally emerging though, access to space might start to get cheaper.

Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[MichaelSmith]

Mainly because Elon Musk came along and said "fuck it, we can do this right".

Maybe it also has something to do with the availability of tools for doing large scale engineering. When Apollo was running it was the only project of its scale in the world. Now we have good CAD tools and tools for requirements management which can be used to track interface changes. NASA invented techniques for all of this but only in the last 15 or 20 years has the private sector really been able to pull off huge aerospace projects.

Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right.

[Viper23]

It's cheaper because we've come up with better ideas on how to do it. That's what's so great about technological progress and all. What’s expensive yesterday becomes cheap tomorrow because we've found a more clever way to do it.

As for the "money is keeping us on the ground" argument. The real issue and the real use / value of money is resource allocation based on utility value. We'd rather have HD televisions then people on Mars, so we spend our resources on those. Actually, other than the gee wiz factor of saying "look that red ball over there has people on it" most people don't really see that much utility to sending people there. That is what's really keeping us here. Far that matter, most human space travel is rather meaningless. For the cost of putting a few people on Mars we could swarm a good portion of the space between here and there with robots to do what ever it is that we intend to there, but we haven’t even found that utility value high enough compared to say... feeding people.

So, why are we not all over space? Short answer is that for the moment, we've got better and more important things to do.

Re:Where?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

It's meteors all the way down . . .

Re:Rain happens when God cries

[Smivs]

...evidence of water ice along with organic compounds...

Chilled beer, anyone?

Re:There's a lot of fucking water out there.

[noundi]

You know, I for one have always welcomed our water bear bringer of life to earth from space overlords. They probably even brought the water with them, being water bears and all. Coolest creatures on earth, without a doubt.

What makes you think the Chinese can do it?

[Kupfernigk]

I'm getting rather tired of this "The Chinese can do everything, blah blah blah" - so often used as a justification for spending money on willy-waggling projects. China is a country with a vast population and severe resource limitation. They can produce plenty of engineering and science graduates, they can do cheap manufacturing of increasingly small products, but spaceflight requires huge natural resources - energy and material - and for China to deflect those resources to it will not merely slow the progress of their industrialisation, but raise prices on world markets, making the exercise less affordable.

In his 200X books, Arthur C Clarke suggested that China would do space travel on the cheap. But he always had to imagine a (nonexistent) nuclear drive to overcome the energetic considerations of getting to Mars and beyond.

Re:What makes you think the Chinese can do it?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

While I am not so sure that China will make it to the moon anytime soon, I think the belief that they will comes from a different approach to the problem than we take in America. America is a very risk adverse society in general and this has filtered heavily into our space program. We spend, literally, billions of dollars every year in this country building up infrastructure and bureaucracy within companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Gruman to design and manufacture very complex technical systems (read rockets and spacecraft) which have a 95% + success factor. I have worked on spacecraft design projects and getting a risk analysis with that high of a success rate is incredibly difficult. We are talking about connecting multiple valves, switches, screws, cables, etc. (parts level components) that each come with their own failure/success rating. These get implemented into triple and quad redundant designs so that the risk models can show parallel success paths which is what eventually allows the final massive system to have a 95% + success rating. All of this requires extraordinary amounts of personnel, and, as the number of people working on a project increase, so does the accompanying paperwork and approval meetings and so on. Thus, in order to launch one damn rocket, America literally employs tens of thousands of people at all levels micromanaging every single screw in a system (no, really, I did screw tracking for a summer internship once...Lockheed Martin never loses screws...).

The Chinese culture, currently, allows a different approach to be taken. Primarily, China takes after Russia in its approach to space access. Their motto basically boils down to, "Keep it simple and make 2 just in case." Russia, for instance, has multiple factories capable of literally assembling entire launch vehicle systems rapidly down miles of assembly line. Parts come in by train and are moved down miles of assembly line in huge factories and, basically, a complete rocket is spit out the other side of the factory. Is there as much analysis and modeling of risk and failure potential? No. Do the Russians care? No. If this particular rocket blows up, hell, just use the next one off the assembly line. What about the payload? Well hopefully the customer was smart enough to keep it simple as well and made two. China takes a similar approach. They also trade cost for risk. By not over-designing their systems, they can keep the cost low and produce tangible results faster. However, there is a higher likely-hood that the duct tape holding the vent open will tear and the rocket will explode. Nonetheless, they have backups so they don't worry about it. From an external point of view, however, it appears that they are doing exactly what America is doing at twice the rate twice as well. That's not entirely true, they just take a very different mission approach.

To be complete, just about every culture has its own quirky design methodologies. Russians are pragmatic and get the job done. Americans value safety and low-failure rates. The Japanese spend a lot of time and effort streamlining and optimizing their manufacturing process. Every culture has a different approach because every culture is made up of slightly different values. To use a metaphor, there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Americans try to chose the safest. It gives off the appearance that they are slow and wasteful (and to some extent we are) when compared to trailblazing 'craizes' like Russia and China. Nonetheless, all paths have their potential benefits and disadvantages. =)

Why not nuclear propulsion & rotational gravit

[master_p]

Nuclear propulsion can easily move us to the furthest points of our Solar System with ease. Gravity produced by rotation can solve the bone loss problems. A Nuclear energy source can also provide enough power to build an electromagnetic shield around the spacecraft (make the spacecraft a large dynamo, just like Earth) and enough power for smaller craft that can be used for landing to planets.

It would cost a lot to build such a big spaceship, and it could only be built in space, but there is no alternative, really. Such a ship would allow mankind to go near each and every solar system body and also land in Mars and other rocky planets.

Re:Where?

[MichaelSmith]

Its not hard to see how water can form in free space. If you have a cloud of hydrogen going one way and it collides with a cloud of oxygen going the other way the interface between the two will be a shock wave with significant temperature and pressure. At the interface the hydrogen will combine with the oxygen and you have water.

Re:Where?

[stjobe]

Earth is 70% water or so

No, about 71% of the Earth's surface is covered in water, the total mass of which is about 1.38E18 tons. The Earth weighs about 6E21 tons, so the Earth is about 0.00023% water.

Also:

There are various popular theories as to how the world's oceans were formed over the past 4.6 billion years. Some of the most likely contributing factors to the origin of the Earth's oceans are as follows:

        * The cooling of the primordial Earth to the point where the outgassed volatile components were held in an atmosphere of sufficient pressure for the stabilization and retention of liquid water.
        * Comets, trans-Neptunian objects or water-rich meteorites (protoplanets) from the outer reaches of the asteroid belt colliding with a pre-historic Earth may have brought water to the world's oceans. Measurements of the ratio of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and protium point to asteroids, since similar percentage impurities in carbon-rich chondrites were found to oceanic water, whereas previous measurement of the isotopes' concentrations in comets and trans-Neptunian objects correspond only slightly to water on the earth.
        * Biochemically through mineralization and photosynthesis (guttation, transpiration).
        * Gradual leakage of water stored in hydrous minerals of the Earth's rocks.
        * Photolysis: radiation can break down chemical bonds on the surface.

  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth

Re:Get a grip

[ledow]

Er... there is a *slight* problem of distance - given that the nearest star is about 8 light years away and we can't even get near light-speed. The furthest object ever made by man is currently dead in terms of power and not that far outside the solar system - but still moving at phenomenal rate.

So, looking for any planet isn't even worth the effort until we solve that problem. In the meantime, we're not caring about *life*, we're caring about *fuel*. Water is (or can be made to be, if you happen to have a large, bright sun nearby or a finite power resource) potential fuel... which means less fuel taken with you, which means more and cheaper space missions to start reaching further places, more "refuelling depots" and a lot less effort expended on space travel in general. The best way to achieve something is to commercialise it. When we're all able to zip to the moon for a few hundred grand, then we can think about visiting other places with probes.

The stable temperature? Not that big an issue in most circumstances - humans have invented a range of devices to control temperature on everything from deep-space satellites to their garden shed. We can't handle the extremes, but the moon is actually quite receptive to us... not as much so as the Earth but a damn sight more so than any other body in the solar system and the vast majority of those yet seen (or their presence indicated) anywhere in the universe (but admittedly, we know only a little about what's out there).

The long-term, fantasy plans should always be looked at. But they should quite rightly be overshadowed by the possibility of actually making local space travel somewhat more convenient... one will breed the other, but it only works that way around.

Get me to the moon, then funding to get me Mars will appear, then funding to get me to Jupiter will appear, then funding to send me to another system will appear. But even the first is almost financially impossible at the moment without some pretty basic technology / base there to help us along.

Re:If asteroids have water...

[Viper23]

Thing is that they do have water on them.

Europa
Mars
Neptune

If you go and look up the planets in our solar system, you will notice that most if not all of them list water as part of their composition. It's just that on most of them it's either so cold that the water exists as ice or it's so hot that the water is permanently steam. What's special about the Earth (at least for the moment) is that we have the right temperature for the water to be liquid.

Support? How about "do not refute"?

[interactive_civilian]

The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet.

Uhhh... I have a hard time necessarily accepting this. Another perfectly plausible hypothesis is that water and simple organic molecules are fairly common in the solar system (and perhaps beyond), and therefore it is not surprising for it to be everywhere. Earth formed in the right place and under the right conditions for a lot of it to condense into oceans, oceans that are hypothesized to have once covered the entire surface of the planet. These findings equally "support" this hypothesis, as do the findings of amino acids and water in some comets.

It seems to me that the best they can say is that these findings do not refute the hypothesis that asteroids brought water and organic compounds to Earth. There is plenty of geochemistry on Earth to make its own organic compounds and turn them into biochemistry. Citation provided.

Re:Where?

[Sockatume]

That's not how it works. There's the square root of bugger-all oxygen in space, so the odds of an O atom finding an H atom are beyond astronomical. Luckily they're not molecular gases, or there'd be an insurmountable activation barrier to deal with too. However there are aggregates of carbon or silicon atoms in space (grains) which O or H atoms can adhere to for long periods of time and diffuse around on. That greatly increases the chances of a reaction to form an OH, and in the very long term, water. The same's true of all molecules in space, essentially.

The Chinese can do it

[symbolset]

Nuclear energy plus plasma rocket equals nuclear drive.

There's a good chance given the history of Chinese information gathering that they have enough details to get it done. Now the question is, do they want the prize badly enough?

Maybe a stupid question....

[argStyopa]

"The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet."

Well, it seems to me that whatever the processes were that would have generated/collected water and organics on these asteroids, would just as likely have SIMILARLY generated/collected water and organics on the debris that accreted to form the earth in the FIRST place, no?

I mean, I understand that the accretion process from dust>>>planet was traumatic and probably involved a great deal of heat, but
a) the crashing of meteorites to earth is easily just as traumatic
b) while all the "envisionings" of early-forming protoearth illustrate it as a molten hellhole, I'm curious why? I could see a great deal of energy being generated by the collision/compression of the dust/debris cloud, but wouldn't most of this be in the gravitational center of mass? The outer surface would both suffer less compression heating AND be able to quickly radiate heat away, no? Further, this process would have taken at least hundreds of millions of years, and so not necessarily resulted in really high (ie molten lava) temps at any given point...?

In any case, it seems logical that the process of accumulating water/organics didn't simply *poof* start AFTER the Earth was formed, there were a good 6-8 billion years prior to that, and the pre-earth debris would likely have been just as covered.