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A large portion of Earth’s water may be due to asteroids not comets as previously believed, according to data sent from Rosetta analyzed by scientists.
This happened when our solar system was still young. Researchers initially thought that since comets make up some of the most basic space rocks in the Solar system, they were also the ones to bring on our planet’s surface core life elements like organic compounds.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta space apparatus is serving researchers data that could help them discover more about how these traveling snowballs influenced life on Earth and the overall dynamic of our solar system. Rosetta was sent on Comet 67p/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, turning into the first shuttle to circle a comet this August. In November, Philae, one of its landers managed to reach the comet’s surface and send in date shortly before it shutdown losing power. Rosetta is also the first space mission to fallow a comet as it orbits around the sun.
Now, Rosetta has lent a hand in solvingthe puzzle about how Earth came to have so much water today.
Before Rosetta started circling Comet 67p/C-G in August, it was operating an instrument known as ROSINA (short for Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis) to investigate the chemical traces of gasses in the comet’s surroundings . Researchers concentrated on information about water provided by Rosina to help uncover whether comets or asteroids conveyed the water our planetary ocean.
In order to discover the source of water on Earth ,researchers searched for bodies somewhere else in the earth’s planetary group with comparative water.
To check whether comets may be the ‘wellspring’ of Earth’s water, in 1986, the ESA probe Giotto flew by Halley’s Comet, being the first spaceship to closely observe a comet. But it found that the water composition on Halley’s Comet was not compatible with that available on our surface.
Another source of comets is the ‘Frisbee- shaped’ Kuiper Belt. Presently, Rosetta has gathers information from Comet 67p/C-G, belonging to Kuiper Belt. But data from Rosetta showed that the comet has an even less compatible type of water than Haley’s.
This led scientists to assume that comets may not be Earth’s water source. They now think that asteroids might be have actually brought water on our Blue Planet. Some authors believe that even if today asteroids have very little water, in the past, about 3.8 billion years ago they might have had more. But in order to verify this hypothesis, future samples from what is left of asteroids water should be gathered and compared to Earth’s water to see if they are similar compounds.
