Water in near-Earth asteroids may provide fuel for future rockets

According to foreign media reports, scientists believe that water distributed throughout the solar system may provide fuel for future rockets. Scientists are trying to figure out how much water is in the solar system, especially near-Earth asteroids. Astronomers have discovered nearly 20,000 such space rocks, and even made some close observations of some of them. For example, Japan ’s Hayabusa 2 and NASA ’s OSIRIS-REx mission are closely monitoring such objects. Not all of these celestial bodies have water, but some of them do have water.

We know that there are water-containing minerals on the asteroid. This is known from the meteorite falling on the earth. "Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement," Water on Earth may also come from a meteorite impact. " "

It is important to understand the distribution of water in the solar system. In addition to helping us further understand the origin of life on Earth, hydrogen and oxygen, which are formed by the decomposition of water, can also provide fuel for rockets. If this becomes a common situation, rockets do not need to carry a lot of fuel when they leave the earth, so the cost of flying back and forth in space will be significantly reduced.

The team used ground-based telescopes to observe these asteroids to estimate the amount of water in the solar system. But these observations are a bit tricky: the moisture in the Earth ’s atmosphere will affect the calculation of the asteroid ’s water storage. So the team used another slightly different marker. The marker does not actually represent the presence of water, but it only appears at the same time as the marker representing water, so it can be regarded as an indirect marker of water.

Combining these observations with other meteorite data, the team made a rough estimate of possible water storage in near-Earth asteroids. Estimates show that there may be between 400 billion and 1.2 trillion liters of water in these space rocks.

Ideally, the team should make a similar calculation based on the data collected from space. Because in space, the Earth ’s atmosphere will not interfere with direct markers of water. But this will not happen until the James Webb telescope is launched. The telescope is currently scheduled to be launched in 2021.

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