Asteroid mining

The surface of the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet as seen from the Philae lander. November 12, 2014. (Photo: Handout/ European Space Agency (ESA))

Michael Sainato reports at Observer,

On Friday, June 3, Luxembourg’s leaders announced the opening of a 200 million euro credit line to fund space mining initiatives. The tiny European country wedged between Belgium, France and Germany laid the groundwork in February 2016 to begin investing directly in companies focused on mining asteroids in space.

The idea of space mining seems like a pipe dream stemming from science fiction films like Moon, but the basic technologies, according to the BBC, make it possible for spacecraft to land on asteroids, mine rare minerals and return the booty to Earth.

Two U.S. companies, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have already finalized agreements with Luxembourg’s government to use the country as a center for asteroid mining.

Deep Space Industries’ project, Prospector-X, hopes to launch a small experimental spacecraft to test the obstacles researchers must overcome for exploratory robots to investigate asteroids for possible mining after 2020. The minerals most likely to be mined are platinum, iridium and palladium, which are very rare on the surface of the Earth, but are known to be more abundant on some asteroids. In 2015, an asteroid estimated to hold 90 million tons of platinum, worth $5.4 trillion, passed within 2.4 million kilometers of Earth, closer than Venus, our closest planetary neighbor. Mining platinum and other rare minerals from asteroids poses astronomical challenges and costs, but the potential benefits if these problems are solved are exciting scientists and entrepreneurs worldwide.

Rare Earth metals are abundant within the Earth’s crust, but their widespread distribution makes mining very difficult. On asteroids, these metals are evenly distributed throughout its mass and in higher concentrations than Earth. Thousands of asteroids close to Earth’s orbit have been discovered by scientists, and the relatively lower gravitational forces of asteroids make it potentially easier for a spacecraft to land and take off on an asteroid compared with the moon.

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