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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the gonna-take-a-trip-on-my-favorite-rocket-ship dept.

The asteroid-mining industry has taken a step closer to becoming an actual thing, with the successful deployment of Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft from the International Space Station Wednesday night. The A3R's three-month mission will be used to test and validate some basic technologies that the company hopes to incorporate in future spacecraft that will prospect near-Earth asteroids for potentially valuable resources.

"Our philosophy is to test often, and if possible, to test in space," says Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki. "The A3R is the most sophisticated, yet cost-effective, test demonstration spacecraft ever built."

The small craft was sent to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 resupply mission in April. On Wednesday (July 15), it was sent out the Kibo airlock to begin checking out its avionics, control systems and software, among other systems. It will be followed up by the Arkyd-6 (A6), another demonstrator set to launch later this year. The larger A6 will check out next-generation attitude control, power and communication systems, as well as the sensors that will be used to detect resources with good potential for mining.

When I was a kid I found a science fiction novel on the shelves in a cabin in Glacier National Park entitled, "Assignment in Space with Rip Foster," in which the heroes try to steer an asteroid of pure thorium back to Earth orbit. The cover of the book was hokey, but the story was one of the better "science" science fiction stories I've read, in the sense that there were no magical technologies to make everything easy to accomplish; there was just plain old rocketry and physics. But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:51AM (#211007)

    If the belt was formed from dust but never coalesced into a planet, then its geology would be different.

    I never understood this hypothesis. Take, for instance, solid iron asteroids & meteorites found here on Earth. Does it make any sense that a cloud of dust will just happen to be almost completely iron, and that the small size of the rock somehow had the massive gravity required to heat and fuse the dust cloud? Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Even if dust were the building blocks, the dust balls would have to have become at least proto-planet sized first for the pressure / molten state to occur and thus stratify the materials. Then when a few of these larger sized objects collided they could be shattered apart to produce the type of asteroids we see. It just doesn't make any sense to me that a body made of dust that's not large enough to create enough heat and pressure for molten states of matter would collide with another big ball of dust and produce a rather uniformly distributed chunk of material. I suppose the collisions of dust balls, be they big and fast enough, could yield the heat required to briefly produce some molten materials, but given that the input was randomly arranged dust the resulting asteroids wouldn't have a uniform internal composition. We're talking "dust" not atoms, so gravity alone wouldn't stratify it.

    However, if you start with a big ball of hydrogen gas big enough to ignite and begin fusing into heavier elements, then blow THAT apart, you might have had some stratified layers or perhaps even more interesting structures formed according to magnetic properties. Point being: There is no evidence that everything coming out of a nova will be "dust". At the distances we observe a nebula what we perceive as a "dusty cloud" could be (and very likely is) rather chunky up close. If nothing else, asteroid mining will help us weed out incorrect guesses as to how our solar system was formed -- such as this "asteroid made of dust" bullshit.