​Researchers develop a steam-powered spacecraft that can hop between asteroids

Last year I wrote an article about Asteroid mining. This quadrillion market attracts scientits and businessmen around the world. Science doesn't stay stagnant and we suggest to take a closer look at this field. (Spoiler: soon will be announced a mission).

Thanks to a mashup of science and industry, researchers have developed a prototype spacecraft that can mine water from an asteroid, use that water to generate steam, then use that steam as fuel to hop across the surface of an asteroid — or even jump to an entirely different world altogether.

Last Friday Jake Parks, a Writer of Astronomy.com, has told about the prototype spacecraft - named «The World Is Enough» (WINE). Further are an excerpts from an article.

♦️The prototype spacecraft — named The World Is Not Enough (WINE) — was largely developed by Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, with plenty of help from planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida.

♦️According to Zacny, a Vice President and Director of Exploration Technology at Honeybee Robotics WINE is the first prototype to successfully show it can combine all the technology necessary for ISRU and steam propulsion: It heated the analog asteroid regolith, extracted water, and then used that water to create enough steam to propel itself right off the ground.

♦️A basic version of WINE would have about 75 meters per second (250 ft/s) of delta-v, which is the total change in velocity the spacecraft would experience as it propels itself off the surface of an object.

♦️This amount of propulsion «is enough to hop a distance of several kilometers at a time on a large world like Europa,» Metzger told Astronomy via email.

♦️According to Metzger, a WINE would have the potential to indefinitely travel between countless asteroids in our solar system — that is, as long as the targets have both water and relatively low gravity.

♦️Alternatively, a WINE could carry its own instruments for on-the-fly analyses of larger worlds. The primary payload likely would be used to analyze a target's ice content, determining things like how much water is available and how much metal and organic content is within that water.

♦️In order to generate enough power for the initial tasks of mining and making steam, the WINE spacecraft would utilize deployable solar panels. However, if the craft were to venture too far from the Sun it would need to rely on Radioisotope Heater Units (RHUs) to kick off its mining operation.

♦️Though a WINE spacecraft would likely need supplemental sources of power to run its mining operation on a distant world, the benefits of a semi-perpetual spacecraft would far outweigh the extra engineering challenges it requires.

♦️Metzger said, «WINE was designed to never run out of propellant so exploration will be less expensive. It also allows us to explore in a shorter amount of time, since we don’t have to wait for years as a new spacecraft travels from Earth each time.»

💬 Best Comments on Reddit

ErikTheAngry: «75m/s of DV isn't much. It'd be enough to slowly travel to different asteroids, possibly, but remember it needs to slow down again. 35m/s of "acceleration" won't get you anywhere fast. Those asteroids aren't nearly as close together as they are in movies.»

🎑 What is shown in the photo?

The WINE prototype spacecraft that will harvest water from targets and use that water to create steam that it will use as fuel.