Did comets bring water to Earth? WHATSUP may know

Time of India

2 days ago

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Kolkata: Did comets bring water to Earth? WHATSUP may fetch the answer! Goutam Chattopadhyay, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, who grew up in Hooghly's Nabagram, has developed an instrument aboard a self-propelled micro-satellite to explore the mysteries of water in the solar system.
The Water Hunting Advanced Terahertz Spectrometer on an Ultra-small Platform (WHATSUP) — a shoebox-sized satellite instrument — is designed to detect and analyse different forms of water in space. WHATSUP aims to help answer one of planetary science's enduring questions: Did comets bring water to Earth?
"Understanding where and how water exists throughout the solar system could help identify environments potentially capable of supporting life," said Chattopadhyay.
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One of the most widely accepted theories about the origin of Earth's water suggests it was delivered by water-rich asteroids and comets during the planet's early formation. These icy bodies, which formed in the colder regions of the outer solar system, contained not only water ice but also organic molecules and volatile compounds. During the heavy bombardment phase, millions of years of impacts transferred these materials to the young Earth.
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This slow accumulation eventually provided the water that fills our oceans today.
Chattopadhyay says the idea is to deploy multiple WHATSUP units as secondary payloads on future missions to Mars or other planetary bodies. Once in space, they would independently navigate toward various comets to perform high-precision, high-resolution spectroscopic measurements of different water isotopes.
"In a sense, water has 'colour' — each isotope of water has a distinct spectral signature, much like how different colours of light have different frequencies.
WHATSUP is designed to detect these subtle differences with exceptional accuracy. This capability could mark a major breakthrough in solving a question that fascinated scientists for decades," he explained.
WHATSUP is a next-generation, ultra-compact, low-power, room-temperature submillimetre-wave spectrometer operating in the 500–600 GHz range. Designed primarily for CubeSat and SmallSat platforms, it is equally well-suited for a wide range of other space missions.
What sets WHATSUP apart is its use of advanced CMOS system-on-chip electronics, an innovative low-profile, low-mass antenna, MEMS-based terahertz switching, and a novel programmable calibration load.
"These cutting-edge components are integrated into a highly efficient system weighing just 2 kg and consuming less than 7 watts of power—an achievement that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago," said Chattopadhyay.
The technologies developed for WHATSUP have broad applicability beyond comet missions. They can be adapted for future NASA missions to planetary and cometary bodies such as Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Venus, and Titan, as well as for Earth science and astrophysics investigations.