NASA/JPL-Caltech | Asteroid Belt | An illustration of the asteroid belt. A team of researchers has found that many of the asteroids that populate the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were actually once former comets.
NASA/JPL-Caltech | Asteroid Belt | An illustration of the asteroid belt. A team of researchers has found that many of the asteroids that populate the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were actually once former comets.
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Wouldn’t this mean that the asteroid belt is loaded with ice, and could therefore be the basis for sustaining life and generating fuel, making mining the asteroids far more of a practical possibility?
“Asteroid Belt Loaded with Four Comets”
Gee, I hope he can make it through security checkpoints.....
“Eventually, after around 600 million years...”
That’s the timeframe for getting the ‘0bama National Debt’ paid off, isn’t it? ;)
Nature of comets reconsideredThe long-held perspective that comets are pristine remnants from the formation of the solar system has evolved from the prevailing views of 30 years ago, finds planetary scientist Dr. S. Alan Stern in a paper published in the journal Nature... The first evolutionary process to be recognized as affecting comets during their long storage was radiation damage, followed by the discovery that sandblasting from dust grains in the interstellar medium plays an important role. Next, researchers theorized that comets in the Oort cloud are heated to scientifically significant temperatures by passing stars and supernovae, says Stern. More recently, researchers are finding that comets in the Kuiper Belt are heavily damaged by collisions... The classical view that comets do not evolve while they are stored far from the sun in the Oort cloud and Kuiper Belt began to change as far back as the 1970s, but the pace of discoveries about the way comets evolve picked up considerably in the 1980s and 1990s.
Southwest Research Institute
August 8, 2003
