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from the water+solar+electrolysis=rocket-fuel-and-oxidizer dept.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which "arrived" at the asteroid Bennu on December 3 but has been slowly approaching it for weeks, has found evidence of Bennu's interaction with liquid water in the past:
In a conference today, scientists announced that OSIRIS-REx has found evidence of hydrated minerals on the surface of Bennu using its on-board spectrometers - tools used to determine the exact chemical composition of a specific spot.
That means "evidence of liquid water" in Bennu's past, according to Amy Simon, the scientist overseeing OSIRIS-REx's spectral analysis.
"To get hydrated minerals in the first place, to get clays, you have to have water interacting with regular minerals," says Simon. "This is a great surprise."
And they're abundant, too. There's "strong convincing, evidence that the surface is dominated by these hydrated minerals," according to Dante Lauretta, leader of OSIRIS-REx's sample return mission, leading the team to believe Bennu is "water rich".
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:06AM
Excellent point, I was getting ready to make a similar comment.
However, I still don't see why it's terribly surprising. We're talking about a near-Earth that's well within the frost line, and spends about half its orbit notably closer to the sun than Earth (perihelion of ~0.89AU). If there's water present, it can reasonably be expected to spend at least part of its time in liquid form.
The only thing remotely surprising is that such hydrated minerals were found in large quantities on the surface, where liquid water would be exposed to vacuum and boil off. But to me that would simply suggest that it's suffered lots of collisions that exposed deeper material to the surface (or perhaps it was the impactor that smeared another "mudball" across its surface).