1P~1M: Solar wind contribution to Earth's Oceans

Where does the Earth’s water come from? Multiple sources in the early solar system for sure, but the light water source was still missing. In this study published in Nature Astronomy, we found that the bombardment of asteroid regolith by hydrogen particles from the solar wind could in fact easily explain the origin of the light water (light = low Deuterium/hydrogen ratio), not only from Earth’s oceans but also from Earth’s mantle.

We use Atom Probe Tomography to measure the water composition at the surface of a grain of dust retrieved from Asteroid Itokawa by a Japanese space craft in 2010. This was the very first sample return mission from an asteroid. FYI, the heavier part of the water comes from carbonaceous chondrite and enstatite chondrites according previous recent studies.

This paper was recently published in 2021 and led by Luke Daly and with Martin Lee and Lydia Hallis from Glasgow and including from my Curtin Linkedin connections Phil Bland, David Saxey, Denis Fougerouse, William Rickard, Lucy Forman, Steve Reddy, Zakaria Quadir and Morgan Cox and myself from Curtin University

I am a professor at the school of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the director of the Western Australia Argon Isotope Facility, which is part the John De Laeter Centre at Curtin University. I am also part of Space and Technology Centre and TIGeR. The laboratory is supported by AuScope.

If you want to know a bit more but don't have time to check the article, you can watch the "1P~1M" (1 paper in ~ 1 minute) video below which is a quick ~ 1 minute accessible rundown of the paper.

#1P1M #research #science #Asteroid #samplereturnmission #solarwind #earthandplanetarysciences #earthandspacesciences #Itokawa

[swannproust]

can we get hydrogen from solar wind for hydrogen fuel cell?