Water mining in the space
Abstract
Water appears the highly sought product in space. There is hope to find water ice under ever shadowed lunar polar regions. But even this hope will be proved, it does not mean that water mining on the Moon will be successful, because hardness of water ices at extremely low temperature is comparable with diamond hardness. As ever shadowed territories have lack of solar energy, the water mining on the Moon may become unreliable desire. At the same time our Solar System has a lot of water ice in its outer parts. All satellites of giant planets as well as all Kuiper Belt objects consist mainly of water ice. Comet nuclei contain water ice too, and they often have orbits with perihelion distance less then 1 a.u. Some of comets are on orbits that even cross the Earth orbit. Loosing volatiles and being decayed, they produce meteoroid streams. Among tiny refractory particles that burn in the Earth atmosphere when collide it, there are some larger fragments of dispersed parent comet nuclei. These "minicomets" blast in the Earth atmosphere from 10 to 20 times each year, so the total number of minicomets that cross Near-Earth space may be up to 40000 a year. If average diameter of minicomet poses to be 3 meters, it is about 15 m3 of snow or ices and contain at lest 10 ton of pure water. Earlier we proposed to use such mimicomets as kicking bodies to push away dangerous asteroids. It is not hard technical problem to deliver to a minicomet simple vapor rocket engine ("Gheron mahine"). This jet will use unlimited solar energy for heating of cometary material to high temperature an use it as propellant body. Just the same device may be used to capture minicomets in the vicinity of the Earth and to deliver them to Near-Earth orbits or even to the Moon surface. Rocket engines that use solar energy and material of captured bodies can be used many times in space. This allows water mining in space in any necessary amounts without supply from the Earth.
- Publication:
-
42nd COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- July 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018cosp...42E.158B