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posted by martyb on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-over-your-head dept.

One expert... in the field of asteroid mining, has predicted that asteroid mining could begin in 10-20 years:

"Asteroid mining on a regular basis, such as terrestrial mining takes place today, with an established industry and an ecosystem of supporting services businesses for the mining companies, could start anywhere from 20 to 50 years is my personal opinion. But any industry must start somewhere, and I think we will see the first asteroid being mined 10 to 20 years from now, at which point the surrounding ecosystem will begin to grow," [J.L.] Galache said.

However, in order to successfully start asteroid mining, a few obstacles must first be overcome. One of these is insufficient knowledge about certain types of asteroids. Although our understanding of asteroids as a whole is advanced enough, gaining a better understanding of the nature of various types of near-Earth objects could be a critical factor in terms of success. Galache underlined that mining techniques will have to be tailored to specific types of asteroids. "For example, you will not send the same equipment to mine an iron-nickel asteroid as you would a carbonaceous asteroid, and you will not send the same equipment to mine a fine regolith-covered asteroid as a rubble pile. I do believe we have figured out what all the unknowns are and it is just a matter of finding answers and solutions to those unknowns," he noted.

NASA's Psyche mission will visit 16 Psyche, the most massive metallic M-type asteroid in the asteroid belt.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:41PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:41PM (#594856)

    When we use the word "environment" in this context, we're not using it as a synonym for "vicinity", we're really talking about the ecological impact of something.

    There is no ecology of any kind on an asteroid, so there is no "environmental impact" to asteroid mining (unless you have a big accident when trying to get the refined ores back to Earth...).

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  • (Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Friday November 10 2017, @12:59AM

    by SpockLogic (2762) on Friday November 10 2017, @12:59AM (#594951)

    There is no ecology of any kind on an asteroid, so there is no "environmental impact" to asteroid mining (unless you have a big accident when trying to get the refined ores back to Earth...).

    Now what was it that the NOSTROMO accidentally tried to bring back to earth ...

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 10 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @06:00PM (#595232) Journal

    Actually, once building mines in the asteroids starts, pollution out there *is* going to be undesirable. Too much small stuff really limits the speed you can use.

    That said, it might be possible to solve the matter by giving a hunk that you aren't using a strong electrostatic charge. Not sure whether it should be positive or negative, I tend to think negative, because I think ionizing radiation (i.e., UV) will tend to knock off electrons, so you need a really low power ion emitter that only emits protons (or positrons, but be reasonable). Wouldn't need much power, you could probably run it on solar cells beyond Jupiter's orbit. Then various electrostatic processes would attract all the negatively charged matter and even, I believe, neutral matter (Van der Waals?). You wouldn't want it to be fast, so you don't want something powerful, just enduring. And, of course, it would repel positively charged matter from the area, but that would be less effective.

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    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 10 2017, @08:26PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday November 10 2017, @08:26PM (#595328)

      There's different kinds of pollution. In earth-based mining, one big problem is "tailings": all the leftovers from the earth dug up after the valuable ores are removed. They tend to be full of a lot of other not-so-desirable materials like arsenic and mercury, plus you have to put them somewhere, and so they cause problems with the ecology on the surface. In space, there's no ecosystem to worry about polluting; you just have to dump the tailings somewhere. What you talk of might be a concern for smaller asteroids, but if you're mining on a larger body that has at least a little bit of gravity, it should be OK: the tailings will just stay with the body. Many asteroids are what's called "rubble piles", where they're nothing more than a bunch of small rocks being held together by their mutual gravitation; it doesn't take something the size of the Moon to have enough gravity for stuff to not just fly off into space and create a dust cloud. But I guess it would be a really bad idea to indiscriminately use high explosives to blast smaller asteroids.