What would you have to do to make frozen water in space drinkable?

Question

Say in the Future while traveling the stars we would take frozen water from Asteroids and other small objects in space since water is very hard to find out there except on planets. How would one go about purifying it or making it drinkable. Remember free floating objects in space without atmospheres are subject to high amounts of Radiation.

Answer 1

Exposing water to radiation does not, by itself, necessarily impart any radioactivity to the water. The more important issue is what is dissolved in the water in the way of potentially toxic chemicals: metals, salts, etc. The issues and methods of water purification in space are likely to be similar to those used on earth, scaled and adapted. Osmotic filtration, selective adsorption, and distillation are all possible in space.

Answer 2

The thing to think about here is not the radiation, simply because the frozen water molecule probably will not retain any of the radiation. But any water found in space should be handled with extreme care, there is no way to tell if there is any cosmic bacteria, or germs, metals, or even life you get the point. Now if the frozen water passes all these test then you could treat it just as if we where her on earth, the best way would probably be distillation or revers osmosis. Even then it would only be potable water till treated with chemicals. Just like here on earth. Hope this helps and good luck.

Answer 3

First of all you would have to thaw it out and then bottle it in some type of plastic bottle with a neat label and name, it will become a favorite of the fad seekers here in the good old USA and make NASA very rich and who cares if it has radiation or germs, if it is the fad then nobody gives a darn and everyone will buy it. So I say bottle it as spacewater or starwater or asteroid piss and watch the money flow in.

Answer 4

Radiation itself is not a problem, unless the water contains radioactive PARTICLES (ie it contains uranium or some radioactive element). If the water contains no toxic impurities (including non-radioactive minerals such as arsenic), heating the water to boiling (at sea-level pressure!) should kill off any potential pathogens, though the water should probably be fully analyzed first.