Mysterious features on asteroid Vesta may be explained by saltwater

[Admin]

Temporary flows of saltwater could explain mysterious gullies and fan-shaped deposits spotted across asteroid Vesta.

Mysterious features on asteroid Vesta may be explained by saltwater : Read more

 

[Questioner]

Freefall rocket fuel,
Probably one of the first places to get looted for resources.

Can one do electrolysis with salty water?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

http://www.aquarius.umaine.edu/activities/electrolysis.pdf says
"Hydrogen gas will be seen to bubble up at the cathode, and chlorine gas will bubble at the anode."

But, we would want oxygen, not chlorine, for both breathing and rocket fuel. That article states
"In real electrolysis systems, a different solution is used and higher levels of electricity help to
split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen."

 

[Questioner]

Ceres is an alternative for water.
I suppose which ever is a better orbitary link up..

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I doubt we are going to find "fresh" water anywhere that there is no atmosphere that can create rain. There needs to be a distillation effect, taking water from salty brines on the surface, letting them condense in an atmosphere, and having them rain down onto solid surfaces rather than back into the brine. After eons of that process, enough of the dissolvable salts on the solid surface have been washed off and flushed into the lower-lying brine that water can accumulate on the raised solid surfaces and still remain "fresh".

So, I expect we are going to have to deal with brines.

The only potential for "fresh" water that I can imagine might be in the "shady nooks" on bodies like the Moon, where water ice may have desublimated onto a solid surface from a very diffuse gaseous state, never having a chance to dissolve other materials. But, how to transform that water ice into useable liquid water without contaminating it with surrounding materials may not be so easy. I doubt that the shadowed craters at the Moon's south pole are like snow drifts that can be shoveled up.

Mars ice caps are believed to be mostly water ice, so maybe they can be used like "fresh" ice - if there is not too much soluble dust in them. Mars also does not get rain - it is a sublimation process on and off the ice caps.