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Platinum Asteroid Worth Trillions Of Dollars Flies Past Earth

posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the waving-money-goodbye dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Asteroid UW-158 is set to wizz past Earth today, carrying an estimated five trillion dollars in platinum.

Spectroscopic analysis has revealed the composition of the asteroid, and made it a prime target for future asteroid-mining missions. It is approximately 452 metres by 1,011 metres in size. If the analysis is correct, it could be carrying an astonishing 90 million tons of platinum. It will swing past Earth at a distance of 2.4 million km, and will not be visible to the naked eye.

Paging Bruce Willis...

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:54AM

    by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:54AM (#211846) Journal

    Okay, using pretty rough figures (because saying approximately 452 x 1011 is ridiculous) I come up with a volume of just over a tenth of a cubic kilometre.
    Taking a wild guess at an average density of 4 kg/l (basically, rock) then I get a total mass of about 450 million tonnes.
    Are they claiming that this rock is one fifth platinum? Seems unlikely. (Okay, if it is one fifth platinum then the density is likely a bit higher. But even if you doubled the density, it's still one tenth Pt)

    I think somebody may have mixed tonnes and kilograms at some point and the rock really has 90 million kilograms of platinum. (which would still be a rich ore. )

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by draconx on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:14PM

    by draconx (4649) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:14PM (#211957)

    I asked Wolfram how much platinum would be worth $5 trillion (at current value)...

        http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5+trillion+USD+in+platinum [wolframalpha.com]

    ...and the result is ~1.6 x 10⁸ kg, or ~160 million kg. Since that's still several orders of magnitude less than 90 million tonnes, I think you are right that someone confused the units.