NASA Craft To Leave Vesta Heads For Dwarf Planet Ceres

Space is cold, and dry. It can be pretty hard to find water out there, and gas stations are far between.

Planetary Resources [planetaryresources.com] is a company in Seattle set up to mine asteroids. The big deal at first is asteroid-borne water, which comprises up to 30% of some asteroids. They are going after asteroids that pass near the Earth at first.

The big deal is what potentials this opens up for expoloration of our solar system and the stars. With energy water can be converted into LH2/LO2 fuel. The problem is that lifting up the fuel from our deep gravity well makes this prohibitively expensive.

Ceres may have 200 million cubic kilometers [wikipedia.org] of water ice, almost all of it relatively pure and on the surface, 100km thick. That's more water than all of the fresh water on Earth. Ceres has a surface gravity of 0.03 g, so getting the ice or fuel away from there is no big deal. There may be other volatiles there as well - Xenon would be a great find. We've found water on the moon and Mars, but getting the water away is nearly impossible because the gravity on these bodies is just too high. Small asteroids aren't plentiful enough for a huge explosion of exploration and manned habitation in space.

Abundant water and energy are the two essential keys to human and robotic exploration of the solar system. If we can somehow with robots bring energy and equipment to this ball of water we can bring back enough fuel to scoop much larger payloads out of much cheaper near Earth Orbits and move them anywhere from there. That enables larger habitations with centrifugal simulated gravity, water ice mass shielding from radiation, million-kilo LH2/LO2 rockets that start in microgravity and so don't have to spend 90% of their fuel lifting up out of our gravity well.

Ice makes a great construction material too, so if we found a way to put humans on Ceres they need not worry too much about radiation or building materials. It's also a great thermal insulator, and we've learned how to carve habitats out of ice in Antarctica.

In short if that water is really there it is the key to humans establishing a permanent occupation of space, and maybe the fuel we'll use to send the first probes to nearby stars. We'll know in about 30 months.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/uyPmh5hBx9Q/nasa-craft-to-leave-vesta-heads-for-dwarf-planet-ceres

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