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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.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 10 2017, @06:28PM (2 children)
If you're going to use it on the moon, it probably makes more sense to dig it on the moon. Smaller bodies, though, might well have different trade-offs, and for use in space itself, asteroids are probably the best bet. But that seems to depend on automated factories which we are a few years (decades?) from really having.
So his projection is probably overly optimistic in its time-line.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 10 2017, @08:52PM (1 child)
If you're going to use it on the moon, it probably makes more sense to dig it on the moon.
It certainly does, however that doesn't mean that everything you need will be conveniently available on the Moon. The Moon has very different geology from the Earth. IANAG, but I have read some stuff that poo-poos the idea of large-scale lunar mining somewhere, though this seems misguided to me since the Moon is full of craters from asteroid impacts, so there should be lots of different materials available there. After all, all the valuable materials in Earth's crust that we mine today were put there by asteroid impacts; all the valuable and heavier materials that were in the planet at the time of its creation sunk to the core. The Moon is like that too, except that it hasn't had active geology in a very long time, so all that asteroid material is still there, close to the surface, instead of being buried over time by geological processes. However, if you're interested in particular resources like platinum, it might be more efficient to find an asteroid rich in it and mine that instead of digging up asteroid debris on the Moon.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 11 2017, @01:44AM
If you're after something like iron or cobalt, then an impact crater makes a lot of sense. If you're after something else...well, it depends on what else. A lot of things don't seem to show up in impact craters on earth, so they might be difficult to mine on the moon, also. Some are naturally dispersed as the rock wells up from the magma, and are then concentrated by biologic processes over the aeons. Coal is one good example, but only the most blatant one. Those will be difficult to mine in space, and finding them will probably depend on reprocessing the waste after other, more common, materials have been refined out. Rather the way rhenium is (was until recently?) mined on Earth. I expect a lot of new processes will need to be developed that depend on things like vacuum distillation. So expect mining in space to be generally a lot more difficult and energy intensive than on Earth. Water being a bit expensive there, some other form of separation of ore fragments will be needed. My guess is that it will involve a combination of vacuum distillation and electromagnetic separation. https://www.chemguide.co.uk/analysis/masspec/howitworks.html [chemguide.co.uk]
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