NASA on Thursday announced that studies of imagery and geologic data captured by its unmanned Dawn spacecraft of the large asteroid Vesta, located 117 million miles from Earth, likely contained hydrated minerals, or minerals that released water.

To be clear, NASA's Dawn spacecraft didn't detect any water on the asteroid itself, but rather signatures of hydrogen, bound up in minerals on the asteroid's surface in the form of hydroxyl.

NASA states in two new papers that the hydroxyl likely came from "high-speed collisions with asteroid belt rocks released water...thought to have explosively degassed into space, leaving behind pothole-like depressions as it escaped."

Here's a video of the phenomena from NASA: