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posted by martyb on Friday January 20 2017, @02:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the iron-is-a-precious-metal? dept.

NASA wants to uncover the mystery behind the asteroid “16 Psyche.” that may contain a priceless treasure trove of minerals. “We’ve been to all the different planets, we’ve been to other asteroids. But we’ve never visited a body that has been made of entirely metal,” said Carol Polanskey, project scientist for the Psyche mission. Now NASA, led by researchers at Arizona State University, plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to orbit 16 Psyche – an asteroid roughly the size of Massachusetts, made of iron and other precious metals. The mission’s leader estimates that the iron alone on today’s market would be worth $10,000 quadrillion.

Previously: NASA Selects Two Missions to Visit Asteroids


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 20 2017, @04:25AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday January 20 2017, @04:25AM (#456386)

    And all we have to do to harvest it is dig a hole hundreds of times deeper than anyone has ever managed, using mining equipment able to operate at 10,000F, and avoid destroying the Earth's magnetosphere and leaving the planet an airless wasteland in the process! (Okay, we'd probably have to get really greedy for that last bit)

    Not to mention the fact that the energy requirements to lift something from the core to the surface would be almost as much as to send it from the surface into orbit - a bit over 3*10⁷J/kg either way - so energetically speaking it's not actually much closer.

    I think it's safe to say that iron was used because it's pretty much the cheapest metal around, and probably among the least valuable of the asteroid's resources, financially speaking. Besides, it's *way* more convenient to mine in space than in the core - most of the technology is already in the prototype stage, and if you're not in a hurry you can move stuff anywhere in the solar system practically for free using the so-called Interplanetary Transport Network of gravitational slingshots. The expensive part is getting into orbit from Earth, and the price is falling fast. Sending stuff back is cheap and easy - the only hard part is not blowing up anything important when it lands.

    To say nothing of the fact that huge quantities of near-pure iron will be immensely valuable for constructing infrastructure in space. You don't even need much technology, even a cast-iron or welding-deposited space station would be quite serviceable until local infrastructure is capable of more sophisticated construction.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @02:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @02:47PM (#456545)

    and if you're not in a hurry you can move stuff anywhere in the solar system practically for free using the so-called Interplanetary Transport Network of gravitational slingshots

    Yeah, you can get it there and enjoy watching it fly past because you don't have a way to stop it.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:41PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:41PM (#457023)

      So pick a different path that has it ending it's journey with a velocity-shedding slingshot around the moon and ending up in Earth's orbit instead. There's a near-infinite number of ITN paths to get from A to B, all with different approach vectors.