WebProNews

Tag: asteroid mining

  • Asteroid Worth $195B to Swing By Earth on February 15

    On February 15 an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will pass very close to the Earth. It will swing within just 17,200 miles of the planet’s surface, which is well within the orbit of the man-made geosynchronous satellites that orbit the Earth. By coming within just one-thirteenth the distance from the Earth to the moon, the asteroid will set a record for close approach by an object of its size.

    This week Deep Space Industries (DSI), a company that wants to develop the technology to mine asteroids, made the somewhat melancholic estimate that DA14 could contain metals and propellant worth as much as $195 billion. Since the asteroid will fly by the Earth traveling at 17,400 miles per hour, however, it isn’t practical to mine.

    “While this week’s visitor isn’t going the right way for us to harvest it, there will be others that are, and we want to be ready when they arrive,” said Rick Tumlinson, Chairman of DSI. “Even with conservative estimates of the potential value of any given asteroid, if we begin to utilize them in space they are all the equivalent of a space oasis for refueling and resupply.”

    NASA has estimated that DA14 is only about 150 feet across, but DSI believes that is still big enough to be worth billions. DSI “experts” estimate that if 10% of the asteroid were made of minable metals, they could be worth $130 billion. If another 5% of the asteroid could be mined for water, it could be used as $65 billion worth of rocket fuel in space.

    DSI is hoping to begin space mining around the year 2020. In the meantime, the company will be sending “FireFly” probes to examine asteroids, and later “DragonFly” probes that will take samples of the asteroid.

    NASA will also be sending probes to investigate asteroids before 2020. In 2016, the agency will launch the OSIRIS-REx probe, which will visit the Earth-threatening asteroid 1999 RQ36.

  • Planetary Resources Shows Off Some New Asteroid Mining Tech

    Remember Planetary Resources? It’s the startup funded by the Google co-founders, James Cameron and others. The company’s goal is to send mining robots into space and collect valuable minerals and elements from the numerous asteroids that fly around our solar system.

    Now, it’s been a while since the company has last updated the public on what it’s doing, but a video uploaded over the weekend should give you a good idea of the tech the company is investing in for its future goals of mining asteroids.

    The tech on display today is called the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope. The device will be a prospector of sorts that will look for potentially mineral-rich asteroids. The team says the 11 kg telescope is “the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that exists today.

    Be sure to check out the tour of some of the facilities at the end that show some of the work being done with lasers and prototyping. It’s all very impressive.

    I’m not going to pretend I understood everything that he just said, but I do understand that what these guys are doing is extremely important. Much of Earth’s resources are finite. We can alleviate the stress put on our own resources by collecting the same, and maybe even new, resources from asteroids and other heavenly bodies that orbit around earth, our sun, or any of the other planets in the solar system.

    Let’s just hope the technology doesn’t alter the orbits of asteroids and send them straight to Earth. I don’t think a Steven Tyler ballad can save us from that.

  • James Cameron Teaming With Google Execs For Space Mining

    Film director James Cameron is well on his way to being known just as much for his explorer credentials as his movies.

    The 58-year old–whose films Titanic and Avatar are the highest-grossing movies of all time–can now add space exploration to his resume, which already includes being the first man to reach the bottom of the waters of the Mariana Trench and going on expeditions to the wreckage of the Titanic.

    Cameron has now partnered with Google execs Eric Schmidt and Larry Page to fund a trip to space in order to seek out natural resources there, a venture which has been talked about as a goal for years but hasn’t had the right backers to fulfill. The idea is to mine asteroids for resources that can be used here on Earth, such as nickel and iron, and is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars, which is why no one has been able to do it yet. And while it may sound like something out of one of Cameron’s movies–Avatar, perhaps–more and more scientists are getting behind the movement of space mining. In fact, a study was recently published which says that the technology to bring a 500-ton asteroid into the moon’s orbit in order to be mined is either already being used by NASA or will be in the next few years.

    The men behind the ambition form a company called Planetary Resources, which was co-founded by former NASA employee Eric Anderson. The company will unveil more details about their plans next week in a press conference.