Ceres: An ocean world in the asteroid belt

https://www.astronomy.com/science/ceres-an-ocean-world-in-the-asteroid-belt/

126 68 2 years ago

“Ceres is a lot closer and it’s a lot easier to get to than these moons in the outer solar system,” Raymond says. “So it is a very enticing target.

Many of us know we won't live long enough to see the results of any sort of mission to Europa or Titan meant to detect life in their deep, liquid oceans (if these oceans in fact exist, if we ever get there and are able to drill to them). Not only is Ceres much closer, but if this article is accurate, access to the subsurface ocean could be quite close to the surface. Here's hoping it comes to fruition.

b1122• 2 years ago

Depends.

Over the next 2 years, I expect SpaceX to send a lot of probes out.

First, mass to orbit is super cheap now. Second, part of the whole R&D for Mars will be to try a variety of long range engine types and configs, and they love to iterate fast and play.

So I expect probes sent in Mars' direction, but also elsewhere to explore. And I cannot stress this enough, they are clearly capable engineers, but these probes don't need 10 years of development and hyper engineering, because cost to orbit is meaningless.

A probe fails? Who cares! You sent 5 different designs, and can just send more anyhow.

NASA was concerned about cost to orbit, but also perception. A lost probe would be a "waste to taxpayers", and just getting launch windows was a chore. I remember some probes had to wait years for space on the shuttle, so constrained was lift frequency.

But SpaceX is OK with blowing stuff up during tests, with learning as they go. So I imagine 2 years max, they'll be spewing satellites all over the place, without a concern if they fail early, or even make it.

Yet some will. Many will.

And you can bet some will head to asteroids.

Note: at this point someone usually chimes in with how hostile space is, and cheap probes won't work, and yada yada.

I didn't say cheap. Cheap implies skimping out on part quality or construction. You don't need to do that, as the parts are not remotely expensive compared to R&D, dev time and custom build work. In fact if one removes R&D, part cost isn't noticeable.

This means that scale is cheap. Building 1000 probes is almost the same cost as 1. And launch is now super cheap.

Access to Space is on the verge of when airplanes became unremarkable.

And it's coming faster than we think.

elihu• 2 years ago

I hope SpaceX does as you say and starts sending a lot of probes, but a lot really depends on the whims of Elon. There isn't really a strong business case for scattering probes around the solar system. Starlink makes money. Selling launch capabilities to NASA makes money. Doing basic science? Establishing a Mars colony? Those sound more like the kind of thing that isn't going to happen unless Elon insists they do it, and it seems like maybe he's not as interested in space exploration these days as he is in trying to get Donald Trump elected to another term.

sandworm1014• 2 years ago

SpaceX rockets are not optimized for probes, for the higher speeds needed to toss stuff at interplanetary speeds. Sure, they can haul more to orbit and a customer could stack an additional stage, but that is very expensive compared to rockets with established cryogenic/efficient/faster upper stages. SpaceX is optimized for what it is doing (LEO/GEO) and, despite the presentations, shows little engineering interest in exploration beyond the moon.

m4rtink• 2 years ago

You can already see this with all the various lunar landers - quite a crash fest so far, but thenlatest iteration already performs better than the previous one. Can't really imagone similar progress with modern it-must-work-first-time NASA. :)

fpoling• 2 years ago

The problem with this is that presently it takes years for a probe to reach the destination. So one cannot do a quick try-observe-tinker loop. Granted with cheaper access to orbit the time can be reduced by using more fuel, but still space is huge.

woile• 2 years ago

Reading the article pulls me back to the expanse. What a great show. I recall the authors wrote an article expressing how wrong they were to predict that Ceres had no water [0].

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dear-dawn...

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Stay away from da aqua!

Nah but that's probably the smallest gripe one can have with Ceres station. Spinning up a planetoid so it has 0.3 g negative gravity and doesn't tear itself into a quintillion pieces is quite a bit more questionable.

api2• 2 years ago

Yes that whole world aspect is one of the few in the ‘verse that are wholly impractical. The only way you could do it is encase the object in a super strong tensile mesh or shell, in which case you might as well build O’Neill cylinders out of its mass instead.

belter• 2 years ago

All Inners should stay away!

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Imim showxa: da owkwa beltalowda, im da owkwa inyalowda. ("they say our water is Inners' water")

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezU-F028krU

wpasc• 2 years ago

Inyalowda, the more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful

my favorite show ever, imo best sci fi show ever. Ceres station in the books/show is a really cool idea even though it's got several reasons why it couldn't actually work

ricksunny2• 2 years ago

That's some good Belter creole.

Here's @NASA's: https://x.com/NASA/status/1478118356309921792?t=1qK3gqdbZoJl...

kunley• 2 years ago

...and from the plot of The Expanse we know this water will be depleted in about 200 years ;)

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

repurposed!

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

In California, they say water flows uphill, towards money: https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/lw2420.htm

In the Expanse, water goes to Dusters, towards money? (at least that's down-well, gravity-wise?)

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

The existence of liquid water on such bodies, particularly in the early solar system when such bodies were warmed by short lived radioactive decay, has strong implications for theories of the origin of life. It's possible life originated in such a body, then later was seeded onto Earth (and Mars, and Venus) when impacts dispersed life-bearing fragments to later fall as meteorites. It's also conceivable that life could have been seeded into the nascent solar system to colonize such bodies, then later spread to the planets.

This is relevant because the early origin of life on Earth is taken as evidence that origin of life is a fast, high probability process. But if its origin here depended on events that require such warm moist small bodies, then it may be that it either happened early or it wouldn't happen as all, and such an inference would be invalid.

malfist2• 2 years ago

It's possible life was seeded on earth from Mars. Mars was hit by a massive asteroid right in its peek habitability era, and it could have flung living matter to earth just at the start of it's habitability era

marcosdumay3• 2 years ago

early origin of life on Earth is taken as evidence that origin of life is a fast, high probability process

That's a really bad take that just won't die. Life being a fast, high probability process is one between quite a handful of explanations that fit it.

But anyway, adding Mars and the asteroids into the equation doesn't radically change the numbers.

jajko• 2 years ago

If anything life as we know it is a very low probability process due to many filters that we were somehow lucky enough to pass. Some of them for sure we still don't even realize yet.

Luckily for dreamers universe is vast.

lupusreal4• 2 years ago

Life being plentiful in the universe, and the kind of lame arguments for this assumption, entered into the secular science enthusiast dogma as a countercultural reaction to the prevailing Christian dogma of life on Earth being special. Sagan/etc's hand-wavy argument about the number of stars being a prime example.

The dogma is such that people who subscribe to it will often reflexively assume that anybody challenging it is a disingenuous Christian. FWIW I am not a Christian, nor do I have any other religion, but I think there is fair reason to doubt that advanced life is common. For one, you don't have to stack too many improbabilities to easily overpower the number of stars. Secondly, evolution isn't a process that works towards the goal of creating human-like advanced life; in fact if anything it favors crabs a lot more than smart apes. Third, and most important, the rare earth hypothesis is consistent with all of our observations thus far.

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

You're really gung-ho about this idea, huh? :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845800

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

Yep! I'm old and repetitious.

pchristensen• 2 years ago

We may never be able to answer definitively, but another theory is that the evolution of life is a series of steps, some with highly probable pathways (lipids with hydrophobic tails forming enclosed boundaries) and some extraordinarily improbable (formation of eukaryotic cells, incorporation of mitochondria).

The book The Vital Question by biochemist Nick Lane goes into this in great depth. https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-t... He estimated that simple, single celled prokaryotic organisms should be pretty common when the right conditions and probably happened multiple times independently on Earth, but eukaryotic mitochondrial cells may have only happened one single time and all complex life is descended from that one cell. I believe that was covered in https://lexfridman.com/nick-lane/) that

o11c• 2 years ago

The hard part is not "warm the ice enough to melt it into liquid water" but "don't let all the water turn into gas an escape". The phase diagram is a harsh mistress at low pressures.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_wat...

For reference, the surface temperature on Ceres varies from 110K to 235K, which is -163°C to -38°C in chart units, but "effectively zero pressure" (I can't find exact numbers for Ceres, but the 100×-heavier Moon is measured in nanopascals) is off the bottom of the chart.

hnpolicestate• 2 years ago

I've always loved Ceres because it's the name of the space station in Super Metroid.

spelunker• 2 years ago

Funny, I was just reading a chapter in The Dark Forest that included Ceres. What's that thing where you see/hear a word or concept and then it suddenly keeps appearing in places?

beng-nl• 2 years ago

The baader-meinhof phenomenon.

ruined• 2 years ago

frequency illusion

Ceres: An ocean world in the asteroid belt

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