THAT COULD BE USEFUL: Dwarf Planet Ceres Is Full Of Water.

Scientists have long theorized that the surface and subsurface of Ceres has vast stores of water ice. A model developed in 1989 suggested the presence of layers of ice measuring between 3 to 330 feet in the surface and subsurface of this extraterrestrial world.

The model was created using data gathered from ground-based telescopes, but recently gathered data suggest that estimates based on this decades-old model was not far off.

Researchers used images captured by Dawn to analyze the craters in the northern polar region of the asteroid and identified regions of perpetual shadow in more than 600 craters. Of these craters, 10 had bright spots that reflect high levels of sunlight. Wavelengths of light that were reflected off these patches revealed the reflective surfaces contain water ice.

“We spectroscopically identify one of the bright deposits as water ice. This detection strengthens the evidence that permanently shadowed areas have preserved water ice on airless planetary bodies,” study researcher Thomas Platz, from Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, and colleagues reported in Nature Astronomy on Dec. 15.

Launching water into space from Earth is prohibitively expensive. So imagine a huge store of water in a low-gravity environment, conveniently located in the asteroid belt between Mars and the outer planets.