Tiny salt grains discovered in samples returned by the Hayabusa mission imply liquid water could be common in the largest solar system space rock population.
An infamous"space peanut" is fittingly salty: Tiny salt crystals have been found in a peanut-shaped asteroid, implying that the largest body of space rocks in the solar system may be richer in water than astronomers thought.
The team made the discovery by analyzing an Itokawa sample less than twice the width of a human hair collected by Hayabusa in 2005. From this tiny piece of space rock, the team extracted an even smaller sample about the size of a yeast cell. Samples from Itokawa are representative of a type of space rock called"ordinary chondrites," which come from S-type asteroids such as Itokawa. Ordinary chondrites make up almost 90% of meteorites discovered on Earth, but it is rare to find water-bearing minerals within them.
'In other words, the water here on Earth had to be delivered from the outer reaches of the solar nebula, where temperatures were much colder and allowed water to exist, most likely in the form of ice," Che said."The most likely scenario is that comets or another type of asteroid known as C-type asteroids, which resided farther out in the solar nebula, migrated inward and delivered their watery cargo by impacting the young Earth.
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