Many of us dream of living on other planets, but are two things we'll need before it can actually happen: money and raw materials. Now some companies say they have a solution to this problem. They'll mine asteroids for valuable metal ores, and for basic resources like water that we'll need once we're far from Earth.
Lucky for us, the cosmos is packed with the raw materials we need and crave. Scattered across our galaxy are trillions upon trillions of space rocks, filled with the water, precious metals, and other raw materials we'll need to fuel our cosmic diaspora.
A Solar System of Riches
Over four billion years ago, the planets and moons of our solar system began to coalesce from primordial dust. So, too, did the asteroids. While we've known about space rocks for over two centuries, the vast majority of discoveries have been made in the last two decades, thanks to bigger and better telescopes.To date, we've identified some 10,000 near-Earth asteroids, ranging in size from several meters to hundreds of kilometers across. If that number sounds impressive, rest assured it's not: By some estimates, there are upwards of a 150 million asteroids in the inner solar system alone.
Astronomers continue to locate more space rocks on the daily, but we've already found plenty to be excited about. Many of the asteroids out there are loaded with water, a resource that may, in space, be more precious than gold. As Chris Lewicki, president of the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources explained when I spoke with him over the phone, some of this water could be converted to rocket fuel by splitting off the hydrogen. Wet asteroids, then, may serve as cosmic gas stations; watering holes for thirsty spacecrafts and humans alike.
"When you launch a satellite up to orbit, two thirds of the weight is fuel," Lewicki said. "If we could only refuel things without sending them back to Earth, that would open up a planetary highway."
Enticing as that sounds, water isn't even the most valuable commodity locked up inside asteroids. That'd be platinum, and its sister metals, which, renowned for their outstanding catalytic properties, are used in everything from computer hard drives to fuel cells to biomedical equipment. On Earth, these metals are extraordinarily rare: All of the platinum humans have ever managed to dredge from the ground, for instance, could fit inside a small Manhattan apartment. A 500-meter asteroid might contain more.
There's a reason the private sector is now clamoring to get into space. The first successful asteroid miners may become richest human beings alive.
Asteroid Prospecting
The first task on any would-be asteroid miner's list is to start pinpointing some seriously lucrative rocks. While we've got plenty of near Earths to choose from, a trip to any one of these neighboring bodies is still a major investment, so before we send out the drills, we'd like to get as much intel as we can from afar. This, it turns out, is no trivial problem. Asteroids are small, dark, and difficult to make out within Earth's obscuring atmosphere. In fact, the best way to get a good look at an asteroid is to put a scope into space.That's exactly what Planetary Resources is planning to do. Its Arkyd-100, a crowdfunded scope that weighs less than 25 pounds, will sit in low Earth orbit, peering into nearby space to analyze targeted asteroids. The next-gen version is the Arkyd-300, fondly described by company leaders as humanity's first Imperial Probe Droid. The 300-series Arkyds, equipped with propulsion systems, will travel in swarms to nearby asteroids. Once they've reached a target, the bots will analyze the rock in detail, measuring its size, shape, density and elemental composition, and beam the specs back to Earth using laser-based optical communications.
The company has plans to launch two beta droids this year. If all goes well, the Arkyd-100 will launch in 2016, and the first of the Arkyd-300s will blast off in 2018.
Read more here http://gizmodo.com/how-asteroid-mining-could-pay-for-our-first-space-colon-1685429089
