Rock science: Asteroids as space mines

There may be gold up there,but the draw for now is water.

Governments believe it has a future; NASA has a project that may put astronauts on an asteroid in under a decade and on Mars in the 2030s. And if the costs seem high,grumblers are told that one day we might learn how to stop a massive asteroid smashing into Earth.

“We are dreamers,” declares the web site of Deep Space Industries (DSI),next to an image of a metal station hooked up to a giant floating rock. A priority is using hydrogen and oxygen,the components of water locked in compounds on asteroids,to refuel rockets. Early in 2016,the first of DSI’s exploration satellites,smaller than toasters,will hitch-hike into space on rockets carrying other payloads and start scouting for suitable rocks. The same year,another US-based venture,Planetary Resources,expects to launch craft hunting viable asteroids.

Meteorites — chunks that survive and fall to earth after asteroids disintegrate — yield significant amounts of precious metals like platinum,rhodium,iridium,rhenium,osmium,ruthenium,palladium,germanium and gold.

Research firm Bernstein notes that a big asteroid called 16 Psyche,in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and measuring some 200 km across,may contain 17 million billion tones of nickel-iron — enough to satisfy mankind’s current demand for millions of years. But costs and technical hurdles rule out hauling resources down to Earth in the foreseeable future. The real value in asteroid mining is for further space travel — and so hydrogen and oxygen are as attractive.

DSI hopes to launch flying cameras it calls FireFlies early in 2016. Their images will let scientists judge the composition of asteroids they pass. That first phase should cost some $20 million.

“If we are successful producing resources in space,then it makes what NASA wants to do,which is going to Mars,that much less expensive,” DSI chief executive David Gump said.

Planetary Resources plans to send telescopes into space to study asteroids between Earth and the moon. In a later phase,it will send out craft carrying deep-space lasers to gather data on some of the thousands of more distant asteroids.

Reuters