Will asteroid mining be easier than anyone thought?

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Dick Jacobson
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Will asteroid mining be easier than anyone thought?

Post by Dick Jacobson »

The images of the little near-earth asteroid Bennu, returned by the Osiris-Rex spacecraft, are absolutely fascinating. (See https://www.asteroidmission.org/?attach ... 12182#main) It looks like a loose collection of thousands of meteoroids that have piled up throughout the history of the Solar System. If we decide to exploit these resources, maybe all we need to do is grab a few boulders and haul them back to the processing facility.

Of course Bennu is a priceless record of Solar System history and I hope that science will have priority over mineral exploitation.
30-inch homemade Newtonian with periscope
20-inch homemade equatorial Newtonian with periscope
14-inch homemade equatorial Newtonian
10-inch Newtonian that folds flat
6-inch Russian Maksutov-Newtonian on Vixen equatorial mount
Too many small scopes and binoculars to mention
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Dale Smith
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Location: Plymouth, MN

Re: Will asteroid mining be easier than anyone thought?

Post by Dale Smith »

The primary difficulty in asteroid mining is the literally astronomical cost of getting the mining equipment to the site, not the actual mining itself. Once there, the ore can be loaded onto a ship and a portion used as mass for a solar powered mass driver to propel the craft to its destination

Bennu is about 70,000,000,000 kg or 70,000,000 tons. This is roughly the mass of 700 aircraft carriers. Probably not worth the effort for a mission whose sole goal is mining that particular asteroid, but possibly worth it if combined with another mission that happened to be going that way. Beyond mining the asteroid for it materials, another goal could be to eliminate the tiny chance of it colliding with Earth in a century or two.
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