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NASA Finds Evidence of Water on Asteroid Bennu

posted by martyb on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the water+solar+electrolysis=rocket-fuel-and-oxidizer dept.

takyon writes:

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".

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:23PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:23PM (#773056)

    Sorry to sound like an asshole, but what part of "evidence of LIQUID water" didn't all of you understand ? All the comments I read so far are in the line of "Well duh, H2O is one of the most abundant molecule in the solar system and blah blah blah".

    Doesn't any of you know what "hydrated minerals" are ? Don't you know how they form ? They don't form in the presence of water ICE, nor water VAPOR. They form in the presence of LIQUID water.

    Basically, that means that the materials composing Bennu formed in the presence of H2O in its liquid form. That's what scientists found surprising, considering that the only place in the entire solar system where water exists today in its liquid form is here on Earth.

    Geez...

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  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:55PM

    by Sulla (5173) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:55PM (#773074) Journal

    And Mars
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars [wikipedia.org]

    Almost all water on Mars today exists as ice, though it also exists in small quantities as vapor in the atmosphere,[4] and occasionally as low-volume liquid brines in shallow Martian soil.

    And Europa
    https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-hubble-spots-possible-water-plumes-erupting-on-jupiters-moon-europa [nasa.gov]

    Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes.

    Not to say this isn't cool as well, but there appears to be a lot more places out there with liquid water than we originally thought.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:06AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:06AM (#773242)

    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).