- The bright, salty deposits that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet’s gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and subglacial lakes on Mars.
- Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of organic space-born molecules (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite chondrite meteorites (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been previously assumed.
- Juno took the first image of Ganymede’s north pole (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to have been altered by Jupiter’s intense radiation to become an amorphous material without crystalline structure.
Oh, and here's a recently-released mission poster for NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to study the Jovian moon’s icy shell and liquid saltwater ocean: https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey...
Our next issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) is coincidentally all about water.