Kolonizacija Merkura, Plutona, satelita i asteroida

[bigvlada]

Tema za sva ostala potencijalna mesta za baze, automatizovanu industrijsku preradu sirovina, komunikacione releje ili jednostavno dobra mesta za astronomska osmatranjaNASA orbiter finds vast ice deposits on MercuryBY WILLIAM HARWOODSTORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSIONPosted: November 29, 2012NASA's Messenger spacecraft has found strong evidence for vast ice deposits in ultra-cold, permanently shadowed craters near the poles of hellish Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, scientists said Thursday.View of Mercury's north polar region with the radar-bright regions shown in yellow. Scientists have found compelling evidence the radar-bright regions are water ice. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonThe results of observations carried out over the past year and a half indicate between 100 billion and one trillion metric tons of ice are present on Mercury, delivered by impacting comets and asteroids falling into the inner solar system from its outermost regions."We can ask the question, how much ice is there? And for this, we can combine both north and south poles because the situation in the south is very similar to the north," said David Lawrence, a Messenger scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory."Well it turns out, if you add it all up, you have on the order of a hundred billion to one trillion metric tons of ice. The uncertainty on that number is just how deep it goes. We think it's at least 50 centimeters deep, it could be as deep as 20 meters."Translating those numbers into slightly more understandable terms, Lawrence said enough ice is present on Mercury to bury Washington, DC under a column of frozen water two to two-and-a-half-miles high.Messenger is the only spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury. The $427 million mission was launched in 2004, dropping into the inner solar system for three Mercury flybys over six-and-a-half years, using the planet's gravity to help it slow down enough to brake into orbit in March 2011.Since then, the spacecraft has been collecting data around the clock to help scientists understand how Mercury, believed to be 60 percent iron, ended up with an oversize core, a thin shell of a crust and the highest density in the solar system.Other objectives include learning what materials are present in the crust, what powers the planet's magnetic field and how that field interacts with the solar wind and Mercury's tenuous, ultra-thin atmosphere.A long-standing question centered on whether permanently shadowed craters near Mercury's poles, where temperatures are as low as minus 350 degree Fahrenheit, might harbor ice deposits.A high-latitude impact crater illuminated by the angled rays of the Sun creates a region of very warm temperatures on the illuminated rim, lower temperatures on the illuminated floor of the crater, and extremely cold temperatures in regions of permanent shadow, where water ice is stable. Credit: NASA/UCLA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonObservations by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1991 revealed radar-bright areas near Mercury's poles that matched up with craters photographed by NASA's passing Mariner 10 spacecraft in the 1970s."One of the major objectives of the Messenger mission when we were selected and launched was to test the idea, more than 20 years old, that the polar deposits on Mercury, discovered by Earth-based radar, consist of dominantly of water ice," said Principal Investigator Sean Solomon at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.To find out, Messenger carried out three sets of observations.A gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer measured the abundance of neutrons blasted away from the surface by high-energy cosmic rays. Over the poles, the neutron "flux" dropped off in a manner consistent with interactions with hydrogen atoms in water ice.Messenger also measured infrared reflectivity over the poles, which again was consistent with the presence of ice, as were the surface and near-surface temperatures, measured with unprecedented accuracy."We subjected that hypothesis to three very stringent tests," Solomon said. "Does it have the neutron spectrometry signal that you would expect for water ice? Yes it does. Does it have the near infrared reflectance that you would expect for water ice? Yes, it does. And finally, does it match the very detailed thermal models that we can now construct? And the answer is yes, it does."Solomon said no other known material "matches the radar, the neutron reflectance and the thermal characteristics that we have documented with the Messenger spacecraft."Artist's concept of the Messenger spacecraft at Mercury. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonScientists believe water ice and other materials are constantly delivered to the inner solar system by comets and asteroids that occasionally collide, depositing raw materials that, in Mercury's case, can get trapped in the ultra-cold polar craters."Messenger has revealed a very important chapter in the story of how water ice and other volatile materials have been delivered to the inner planets, including Mercury, we think by the impact of comets over time and volatile-rich asteroids," Solomon said."It's extraordinary that this chapter is so well preserved on the planet closest to the sun."Orbiting the sun at a distance of just 36 million miles, Mercury's temperature extremes are unmatched in the solar system, ranging from a broiling 840 degrees to 350 degrees below zero in craters that are never exposed to sunlight.The Messenger findings were published in Thursday's edition of Science Express.http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1211/29mercuryice/Na Merkuru neće biti potreban nuklearni reaktor ili solarni paneli, geotermalna energija i topla voda iz leda su već prisutne.

[bigvlada]

Water has played a big role in shaping dwarf planet Ceres

 

BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 2:00PM, SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

 

 

Ice volcanoes, patches of water ice and a slew of hydrated minerals on Ceres paint a picture of the dwarf planet as a geologically active world — one where water has played a starring role. That’s the theme of recent findings by the Dawn spacecraft, described in six papers in the September 2 Science.

A 4-kilometer-high mountain dubbed Ahuna Mons, with its bowl-shaped summit and ridged flanks, hasthe appearance of a cryovolcano — one that erupts water instead of magma. The relatively young Oxo crater also appears to be home to splotches of frozen water. Given that ice should last only tens of years on the surface of Ceres, the patches must be very recent additions, possibly exposed by a landslide or impact with a meteorite. And the surface of Ceres is slathered with a class of minerals known as phyllosilicates — silicon-bearing substances that form in the presence of water — which further support the idea that water has been present throughout Ceres’ history.

Ceres is the largest body between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn has been orbiting Ceres since March 6, 2015, studying its geology and composition to better understand the formation of rocky worlds. The spacecraft will become a permanent satellite of Ceres after its mission ends in early 2017.

 

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/water-has-played-big-role-shaping-dwarf-planet-ceres?tgt=nr

Edited September 5, 2016 by bigvlada

[bigvlada]

New dwarf planet solar system's 2nd most distant

Oct 14, 2016 Contact Nicole Casal Moore

 

ANN ARBOR—Astronomers at the University of Michigan and their colleagues on the Dark Energy Survey have discovered a new dwarf planet that's more than 90 times farther from the sun than Earth is, making it the second-most distant minor planet in the known solar system.

 

The Dark Energy Survey, which uses a powerful digital camera called DECam on a 4-meter telescope in Chile, was designed to capture images of distant galaxies to understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

 

"But the same sensitivity that makes this a state-of-the-art survey of the distant universe also makes it a powerful tool to look for new objects in our own cosmic backyard," said David Gerdes, the U-M physics and astronomy professor who led the planet-finding team.

 

The DES images are sensitive enough to detect the reflected sunlight from the new object, which is as faint as a single candle 100,000 miles away.

 

The researchers say the discovery of the icy, faraway world shows that their technique is a promising approach for finding "Planet Nine"—a massive body hypothesized to reside around 600 times farther from the sun than Earth. The existence of Planet Nine would explain the elongated, aligned orbits of a group of distant minor planets similar to, but not including, this newly discovered one.

 

The U-M team submitted observations of the object to the Minor Planet Center, an international organization that designates and tracks minor planets, comets and moons. The center gave it a designation—2014 QZ224—but after its orbit has been refined for several more years, the researchers can propose an official name. In the meantime, they've dubbed it DeeDee, short for distant dwarf.

 

At this point in its orbit, DeeDee is more than 8.5 billion miles from the sun, or 92 astronomical units. One astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to Earth. Only the Pluto-sized dwarf planet Eris is currently more distant, though other minor planets with off-centered orbits spend most of their time even further out. On DeeDee, the sun would look like a very bright star.

 

The data indicate that DeeDee is between 200 and 800 miles in diameter, meaning it is probably large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. The researchers expect to obtain a much better estimate of its size from an image they recently obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile. The researchers expect to complete this analysis and publish the results by mid-November.

 

To identify DeeDee, the researchers looked through thousands of images to find moving objects in orbit around the sun, against the background of millions of stars and galaxies that remain in the same place from night to night. Gerdes likens this to "finding a really small needle in a really big haystack."

 

The researchers don't look for planets with their eyes. Thousands of computers at Fermilab were used to analyze hundreds of terabytes of data, a process that would have taken more than 300 years on a single computer.

 

Even with a powerful instrument like DECam, distant minor planets look like points.

 

"Every image taken by DECam is subtracted from every other image from the same piece of the sky. That way, we can find moving solar system objects even if they happen to lie right in front of a background galaxy or star," said Masao Sako, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who was also involved in the search.

 

This analysis still left the researchers with millions of "dots," and many more possible ways to connect them. Computer programs developed by the U-M team took several more months to perform that task. Their code identified DeeDee this summer.

 

"I'm so grateful to have been given the opportunity to work with Professor Gerdes and contribute to this project," said Tali Khain, a sophomore majoring in physics and math whose work for this project involves analyzing the long-term behavior of minor planets beyond Neptune. "It's extremely exciting."

 

Even more exciting would be identifying the elusive Planet Nine. Its existence was recently suggested as a way to explain the off-kilter orbit of the dwarf planet Sedna, which crosses through the plane of the solar system, but swings far out of it. More objects with similar orbits have been discovered since.

 

"The discovery of DeeDee is a promising sign of our ability to find distant new worlds," Gerdes said. "If more things like this are in our data, the tools we've built will find them."

 

But on its own, the new discovery tells us a bit more about where we came from.

 

"All the bodies that make up our solar system came from the same cloud of gas and dust that began to collapse over 4 billion years ago," said Stephanie Hamilton, a doctoral student in physics who was involved in this discovery.

 

"The smallest bodies in the solar system are the ones that preserve its history. They have been knocked around and strewn about through interactions with larger planets, and by studying lots of them we can try to learn how that happened."

 

The Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 26 institutions in seven countries. Its primary instrument, the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, is mounted on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and its data are processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

 

Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, U.S. National Science Foundation, Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, Higher Education Funding Council for England, ETH Zurich for Switzerland, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at Ohio State University, Mitchell Institude for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey, the list of which can be found at www.darkenergysurvey.org/collaboration.

 

The search for solar system objects in DES is funded by a National Science Foundation grant to researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24284-new-dwarf-planet-solar-system-s-2nd-most-distant

 

Ovde se ne pominje, ali imaju još valjda hiljadu kandidata za male planete. U jednom starom stripu (nije Aster Blistok) su istraživanje kosmosa vršili pomoću "broda" tj. planetoida koji je bio potpuno prekriven kupolom a ispod imao normalne ekosisteme sa Zemlje, gravitaciju od 1G kao i dva veštačka satelita od po par desetina kilometara u prečniku. Ako se stvarno pokaže da ovakvih planetica ima toliko mnogo, svakako će početi studije o tome kako se one mogu prilagoditi našim potrebama. Možemo ih preurediti i poslati do Proksime Kentauri da nam glume generacijske brodove ili ih primaći bliže, da glume satelite Venere dok vršimo teraformiranje "planete oblaka". 

[bigvlada]

Making space rocket fuel from water could drive a power revolution on Earth

 

September 28, 2016 by Charles W. Dunnill And Robert Phillips, The Conversation

 

 

Researchers led by NASA's former chief technologist are hoping to launch a satellite carrying water as the source of its fuel. The team from Cornell University, guided by Mason Peck, want their device to become the first shoebox-sized "CubeSat" to orbit the moon, while demonstrating the potential of water as a source of spacecraft fuel. It's a safe, stable substance that's relatively common even in space, but could also find greater use here on Earth as we search for alternatives to fossil fuels.

Until we develop a warp drive or some other futuristic propulsion system, space travel is likely to rely largely on the kind of propellant-based rockets we use today. These work by firing gas out of the rear of the vehicle in a way that, thanks to the laws of physics, pushes it forward. Such propulsion systems for satellites need to be lightweight and carry a lot of energy in a small space (high energy density) in order to continuously pack a powerful punch over the many years, or even decades, that the craft are in orbit.

 

Safety too is of prime concern. Packing energy into a small volume and mass in the form of a fuel means even the slightest issue can have disastrous consequences, as we saw with the recent SpaceX rocket explosion. Putting satellites in orbit with any form of unstable fuel on board could spell disaster for expensive hardware or even worse, human life.

Water is a way around this issue because it is essentially an energy carrier rather than a fuel. The Cornell team isn't planning to use water itself as a propellant but to rather use electricity from solar panels to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and use them as the fuel. The two gasses, when recombined and ignited will burn or explode, giving out the energy that they took in during the splitting process. This combustion of gasses can be used to drive the satellite forward, gaining speed or altering its position in orbit of whichever desired planet or moon is the target.

Solar panels, with high reliability and no moving parts, are ideally suited to operate in zero gravity and in the extreme environments of space, producing current from sunlight and allowing the satellite to actively engage on its mission. Traditionally this energy is stored in batteries. But the Cornell scientists want to use it to create their fuel source by splitting the on-board water.

 Making space rocket fuel from water could drive a power revolution on Earth

 

Extra-terrestrial electrolysis

The proposed process – known as electrolysis – involves running a current through a water sample usually containing some soluble electrolyte. This breaks down the water into oxygen and hydrogen, which are released separately at the two electrodes. On Earth, gravity would then be used to separate the gasses so they can be harvested and used. In the free-flowing zero gravity of space, however, the satellite has to use centrifugal forces from rotation to separate the gases from the solution.

Electrolysis has been use in space before to provide oxygen supplies for manned space missions without the need for high-pressure oxygen storage tanks, for example on the International Space Station. But instead of sending water into space in heavy loads on rockets, we could also one day extract it from the moon or asteroids. If the novel approach of using both the hydrogen and oxygen for satellite fuel proves successful, we could have a ready source of it waiting for us in space. This means it could shape how we power at least some of the spacecraft of the future.

 

From satellites to cars

As is often the case, developments in space technology are pushing concepts that have the potential to help overcome significant energy problems here on Earth. Electricity is really difficult to store and, as we increase our renewable energy supplies, we need to buffer the supply and demand. Wind and solar farms are really inefficient forms of renewable energy, not because of problems with the generating technology but because we often cannot do anything useful with the energy that they produce. The electricity grid struggles at times of high production and low energy need.

The answer, as in outer space propulsion, could involve using surplus electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This produces a storable, transportable commodity in the form of hydrogen fuel. When the energy is needed, it can be released by recombining it with oxygen from the atmosphere. This can either be done in a fuel cell to produce electricity again, or by burning it in a combustion engine or a hydrogen gas burner.

 

Welsh start-up firm Riversimple – along with major car manufacturers Toyota and Volkswagen – is already producing hydrogen fuel-cell cars. So if the hydrogen is produced from solar energy in the same manner as Cornell's satellite, this space technology could become part of your everyday life sooner than you think.

 

 

http://phys.org/news/2016-09-space-rocket-fuel-power-revolution.html

 

Ideja je da se šalju sateliti koji bi u spremnicima za gorivo nosili vodu i onda putem elektrolize, napajane solarnim panelima dobijali vodonik i kiseonik koji bi koristio klasičan raketni motor. Video sam jedan projekat satelita čija bi misija bila da sleti na asteroid ili kometu, pokupi nekoliko hiljada litara vode (plus mulj) i zatim je dopremi do neke orbitalne postaje radi prerade. Jeftinije je (ali sporije) dopremiti vodu iz asteroidnog pojasa između Marsa i Jupitera nego je dovlačiti sa Zemlje. 

 

Može se napraviti i varijanta sa nuklearnim reaktorom, koji bi zamenio solarne panele. U tom slučaju satelit bi bio namenjen višedecenijskom istraživanju solarnog sistema i povremeno bi se dopunjavao vodom na automatskim relejnim stanicama, smeštenim na ili u orbiti većih asterioda (ili stanicama za snabdevanje smeštenim u orbitama raznih satelita koje bi vodom snabdevali gorepomenuti kargo sateliti). Mogli bi da napravimo kompletnu logističku mrežu pre nego što pošaljemo prve ljude u dubine Evrope. 

[hazard]

Pala mi je na pamet mozda smesna ideja, nisam seo da izracunam ima li smisla uopste:

 

Jedan od problema sa kolonizacijom manjih planeta i satelita jeste gravitacija - slabija je od zemaljske, ljudi koji bi se rodili i odrasli tamo (posle verovatno 1-2 generacije, a mozda i ranije) ne bi mogli da funkcionisu na Zemlji, imali bi verovatno izduzene i slabije kosti koje bi popucale pod tezinom Zemljine gravitacije.

 

Da li to moze da se resi sa "rotirajucim" habitatima na neki nacin? Zamislimo nekakvu zgradu na stacionarnom postolju na Ceresu recimo, koja se rotira na tom postolju dovoljno da u rotirajucem delu bude "simulirana" zemaljska gravitacija (1g). Da li bi to mogao da bude recimo "tanjir" koji se okrece na stacionarnom "postolju" (lazy susan :D) ili bi morala da bude vertikalna rotacija (sto je malo teze za izvesti)? Ceres npr. ima gravitaciju od samo 0,029g - koliko bi brzo morala da rotira takva "zgrada" da dostigne unutra gravitacionu silu od 1g?

[Time Crisis]

Pala mi je na pamet mozda smesna ideja, nisam seo da izracunam ima li smisla uopste:

 

Jedan od problema sa kolonizacijom manjih planeta i satelita jeste gravitacija - slabija je od zemaljske, ljudi koji bi se rodili i odrasli tamo (posle verovatno 1-2 generacije, a mozda i ranije) ne bi mogli da funkcionisu na Zemlji, imali bi verovatno izduzene i slabije kosti koje bi popucale pod tezinom Zemljine gravitacije.

 

Da li to moze da se resi sa "rotirajucim" habitatima na neki nacin? Zamislimo nekakvu zgradu na stacionarnom postolju na Ceresu recimo, koja se rotira na tom postolju dovoljno da u rotirajucem delu bude "simulirana" zemaljska gravitacija (1g). Da li bi to mogao da bude recimo "tanjir" koji se okrece na stacionarnom "postolju" (lazy susan :D) ili bi morala da bude vertikalna rotacija (sto je malo teze za izvesti)? Ceres npr. ima gravitaciju od samo 0,029g - koliko bi brzo morala da rotira takva "zgrada" da dostigne unutra gravitacionu silu od 1g?

 

Ako imaš tehnologiju da praviš zgrade po Ceresima, onda je gravitacija verovatno već odavno rešen problem. :P

[bigvlada]

Pala mi je na pamet mozda smesna ideja, nisam seo da izracunam ima li smisla uopste:

 

Jedan od problema sa kolonizacijom manjih planeta i satelita jeste gravitacija - slabija je od zemaljske, ljudi koji bi se rodili i odrasli tamo (posle verovatno 1-2 generacije, a mozda i ranije) ne bi mogli da funkcionisu na Zemlji, imali bi verovatno izduzene i slabije kosti koje bi popucale pod tezinom Zemljine gravitacije.

 

Da li to moze da se resi sa "rotirajucim" habitatima na neki nacin? Zamislimo nekakvu zgradu na stacionarnom postolju na Ceresu recimo, koja se rotira na tom postolju dovoljno da u rotirajucem delu bude "simulirana" zemaljska gravitacija (1g). Da li bi to mogao da bude recimo "tanjir" koji se okrece na stacionarnom "postolju" (lazy susan :D) ili bi morala da bude vertikalna rotacija (sto je malo teze za izvesti)? Ceres npr. ima gravitaciju od samo 0,029g - koliko bi brzo morala da rotira takva "zgrada" da dostigne unutra gravitacionu silu od 1g?

 

Možeš da je simuliraš ali to nikada neće biti prava stvar jer nije u pitanju gravitacija već centrifugalna sila. Pre će se ljudska rasa podeliti na više podvrsta koje će biti prilagođene životu na svetovima sa manjom ili većom gravitacijom nego što ćemo naučiti da menjamo gravitaciju nekog objekta. 

 

U Ringworld univerzumu Larija Nivena, ljudi su naselili planetu sa gravitacijom od valjda 4G na površini. Imaju generatore veštačke gravitacije za zgrade ali van njih svi posetioci se voze u nečemu što liči na motorna invalidska kolica. 

[bigvlada]

Kad smo već kod Ceresa, lepo se potrefilo.

 

Dawn spacecraft maps water beneath the surface of Ceres

Evidence builds for abundant water ice on the dwarf planet

BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 1:30PM, DECEMBER 15, 2016

 

 

 

 

ICY REALMS  Dwarf planet Ceres has more hydrogen beneath its surface near the poles, indicating a subsurface layer of ice mixed in with the rock. Blue shows where the hydrogen abundance is highest.

T.H. PRETTYMAN AND N. YAMASHITA/PLANETARY SCIENCE INSTITUTE

 

Water ice lies just beneath the cratered surface of dwarf planet Ceres and in shadowy pockets within those craters, new studies report. Observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft add to the growing body of evidence that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, has held on to a considerable amount of water for billions of years.

 

“We’ve seen ice in different contexts throughout the solar system,” says Thomas Prettyman, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson and coauthor of one of the studies, published online December 15 in Science. “Now we see the same thing on Ceres.” Ice accumulates in craters on Mercury and the moon, an icy layer sits below the surface of Mars, and water ice slathers the landscape of several moons of the outer planets. Each new sighting of H2O contributes to the story of how the solar system formed and how water was delivered to a young Earth.

 

A layer of ice mixed with rock sits within about one meter of the surface concentrated near the poles, Prettyman and colleagues report. And images of inside some craters around the polar regions, from spots that never see sunlight, show bright patches, at least one of which is made of water ice, a separate team reports online December 15 in Nature Astronomy.

 

“Ceres was always believed to contain lots of water ice,” says Michael Küppers, a planetary scientist at the European Space Astronomy Center in Madrid, who was not involved with either study. Its overall density is lower than pure rock, implying that some low-density material such as ice is mixed in. The Herschel Space Observatory has seen water vapor escaping from the dwarf planet (SN Online: 1/22/14), and the Dawn probe, in orbit around Ceres since 2015, spied a patch of water ice in Oxo crater, though the amount of direct sunlight there implies the ice has survived for only dozens of years (SN Online: 9/1/16). The spacecraft has also found minerals on the surface that formed in the presence of water.

 

But researchers would like to know where Ceres’ water is. Knowing whether it is blended throughout the interior or segregated from the rock could help piece together the story of where Ceres formed and how the tiny world was put together. That, in turn, could provide insight into how diverse the worlds around other stars might be.

 

To map the subsurface ice, Prettyman and colleagues used a neutron and gamma-ray detector onboard Dawn. As Ceres is bombarded with cosmic rays — highly energetic particles that originate outside the solar system — atoms in the dwarf planet spray out neutrons. The amount and energy of the neutrons can provide a clue to the abundance of hydrogen, presumably locked up in water molecules and hydrated minerals.

 

Finding patches of ice was a bit more straightforward. Planetary scientist Thomas Platz and colleagues pinpointed permanently shadowed spots on Ceres, typically in crater floors near the north and south poles. The team then scoured images of those locations for bright patches. Out of the more than 600 darkened craters they identified, the researchers found 10 with bright deposits that could be surface ice. One had a chunk sticking out into just enough sunlight for Dawn to measure the spectrum of the reflected light and detect signs of water.

 

Water vapor escaping from inside the dwarf planet likely falls back to Ceres, where some of it gets trapped in these cold spots, says Platz, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

 

Just because there is water doesn’t mean Ceres is a good place for life to take hold. Temperatures in the shadows don’t get above  –216° Celsius. “It’s pretty cold, there’s no sunlight. We don’t think that’s a habitable environment,” Platz says. Although, he adds, “one could mine for future missions to get fuel.”

 

Ceres is now the third major heavily cratered body, along with Mercury and the moon, with permanently shadowed regions where ice builds up. “All the ones we’ve got info on to test this show you’ve accumulated something,” says Peter Thomas, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, who is not a part of either research team. Those details improve researchers’ understanding of how water interacts with a variety of planetary environments. 

 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dawn-spacecraft-maps-water-beneath-surface-ceres

 

[bigvlada]

Jednostavnije rešenje bi bilo imati (polu)automatizovanu bazu koja bi vadila resurse i habitat za par hiljada ljudi u orbiti oko Ceresa. 

 

Par ideja kako bi to moglo da izgleda na početku.