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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: 3, Interesting) by jdavidb on Friday January 20 2017, @02:52AM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Friday January 20 2017, @02:52AM (#456345) Homepage Journal

    I wrote this up the other day and it was rejected as a dupe. :)

    Here's my writeup [soylentnews.org], this story was fascinating to me, and I did a lot of reading and kept pulling in more articles and info:

    NASA is planning an automated mission to explore 16 Psyche, a Massachusetts-sized asteroid which is believed to be made up of valuable metals such as iron, nickel, and gold. [dailystar.co.uk] In fact the value of the minerals in Psyche at current earth prices would total something with an order of magnitude of quadrillions of dollars.

    According to Wikipedia, 16 Psyche [wikipedia.org] is one of the ten most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt and contains almost 1% of the belt's mass. We've known about it since 1852 when it was discovered by Naples astronomer Annibale de Gasparis.

    Of course, there is no technology in existence that could bring a significant portion of Psyche back to earth, so you don't have to worry about precious metals prices or the earth economy collapsing any time soon. Besides, the mission will not reach Psyche until 2030. The mission was approved on January 4th of this year and is planned to launch a refigerator-sized probe in October 2023. There is some evidence for either water or hydroxyl on the surface of Psyche [space.com], and this mission could determine which. Measurements of the chemical composition of the asteroid should also confirm whether or not the asteroid really contains all that precious metal. It has been speculated that Psyche may be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet and may be similar to the core of our own earth, so this mission may be the first to directly measure the chemical composition of a planet core.

    This will be the first major NASA mission led by Arizona State University [azcentral.com]. Principal investigator on the mission will be ASU's professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who says that she is "psyched," but hopefully we won't hold such a bad pun against her.

    Meanwhile, NASA is also readying a mission to Trojan asteroid Lucy [technewsgazette.com], which shares an orbit with Jupiter. The Lucy mission will be producing surface maps with the next generation of the LORRI Long Range Reconnaissance Imager that is currently flying on the New Horizons spacecraft that imaged Pluto, and instruments for both missions will be produced by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

    After submitting, I learned that Lucy was the name of the mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids rather than the name of a Jupiter Trojan asteroid, so good thing it wasn't posted. :)

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  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday January 20 2017, @02:55AM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Friday January 20 2017, @02:55AM (#456347) Homepage Journal

    So somebody tell me, does anyone actually believe there is gold in this thing, or is that just journalistic sensationalism? I noticed the article I included that mentioned that didn't seem to be the most reputable looking compared to some of the others.

    I get a chuckle speculating about what would happen if somebody some day is able to pull enough gold and precious metals from space to earth that they aren't valuable any more.

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    ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:30AM (#456362)

      I get a chuckle speculating about what would happen if somebody some day is able to pull enough gold and precious metals from space to earth that they aren't valuable any more
      We stop strip mining for the stuff?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 20 2017, @04:17AM

      by Arik (4543) on Friday January 20 2017, @04:17AM (#456382) Journal
      Yeah, there's probably gold in it, though relatively little. A big lump of iron with most stable heavier elements present in trace amounts.

      It would be stupid to bring it to earth though. A total waste. The point to a claim like this is not to bring more iron to earth - it's to avoid having to boost all that iron from earth into space, which would take enormous amounts of energy to do.
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      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday January 20 2017, @05:27AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday January 20 2017, @05:27AM (#456405) Journal

        The factory we would have to boost up there to take advantage of it would probably weigh as much.
        Not to mention all the coal for the blast furnace. ;-)

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 20 2017, @08:21PM

          by Arik (4543) on Friday January 20 2017, @08:21PM (#456682) Journal
          You don't boost a factory. You boost some tools and some skilled people. The people use the tools and the raw materials to make more tools, in a cascade that eventually results in your factory. You don't want to have to accelerate one gram more than absolutely necessary to escape velocity.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 2, Informative) by frojack on Sunday January 22 2017, @08:14PM

            by frojack (1554) on Sunday January 22 2017, @08:14PM (#457409) Journal

            Ok, lets take one step back then...

            Boosting some primitive tools, and the number of people needed to build a factory using those tools, and the housing needed by those people, and the amount of food needed for those people for the decades it will take to build a factory, and the breathing gasses necessary to work for decades in zero atmosphere, will weight far more than the factory.

            You keep stepping back like this with each more imaginative (read: unrealistic) suggestion, and it gets more and more expensive in money, energy, and time.

            At some point you put the sci-fi books down and you ultimately conclude that the metal floating around in space is useless and valueless until you already have a shipboard factory and shipboard housing and shipboard food production, built on earth with existing metals, and assembled in orbit, and then sent to the target asteroid.

            At some point you simply have to stop handwaiving all these things into existence just because some author in a sci-fi book imagined them. Welcome to the real world. Sorry to burst your bubble son.

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    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday January 20 2017, @04:40AM

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday January 20 2017, @04:40AM (#456391)

      I'm not sure if there's any direct evidence at this point, but I think it's considered a reasonable speculation - in the absence of planetary geology and weathering effects, metals should tend to congregate together - similar densities (compared to CHON, etc), similar chemistries and responses to electromagnetic forces, etc. So as the protoplanetary disc condensed, the metals would tend to clump together.

      In this case they're going a step further - they think this thing is an ejected protoplanetary core, meaning it would have been subjected to even further density-based concentrations, and likely have a similar ratio of metals to the cores of other rocky planets. Which are kind of an unknown at this point, but predicted to be rich in heavy metals.

      As for speculation... probably similar to if someone figured out a cheap and environmentally friendly method to concentrate valuable metals from seawater - can I interest you in corrosion-resistant gold-plated sewer pipes? Most "precious metals" actually have physically valuable properties, totally aside from the dollar value our economic game assigns them.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:33PM (#456517)

      I get a chuckle speculating about what would happen if somebody some day is able to pull enough gold and precious metals from space to earth that they aren't valuable any more.

      For copper, people stealing cables to sell for scrap value would stop.

      For gold, we would start to at least gold plate every connector, if not simply replace copper with gold entirely in electronic circuits, because gold is much more corrosion-resistant (I'm not sure whether or not it's also a better conductor).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:08PM (#456556)

        I'm not sure whether or not it's also a better conductor

        Gold is a very good conductor but copper is a somewhat better conductor than gold for the same thickness of material. The primary advantages of gold for electronics are that it does not corrode easily, and it is more malleable and ductile.

        I suspect gold wires do not break as easily as copper due to metal fatigue. So if gold was cheap you might find it used as the conductive material in thin flexible cables.

      • (Score: 2) by captain_nifty on Friday January 20 2017, @03:47PM

        by captain_nifty (4252) on Friday January 20 2017, @03:47PM (#456569)

        We'd likely use silver wire for most things, it is one of the best conductors, better than copper. Gold is also a good conductor, better than aluminum but worse than copper.

        Gold has the downside of being a relatively soft metal, if lined in plumbing it would wear off via erosion fairly quickly. But we might use a lot more gold alloys. Really if you get into post scarcity gold, silver, and diamonds other precious materials have some great design properties, diamonds have high thermal conductivity making them great for heat exchangers. One thing to look at is todays increasing use of Sapphire as a clear screen material, we can make them artificially lowering the price, but today we make small windows out of jewels!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:28AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:28AM (#456864)

          Gold is also a good conductor, better than aluminum but worse than copper.

          Well, it's hard to compare aluminum and copper or gold directly like that. Gold and copper beat aluminum for the same thickness, but aluminum is much less dense so it is a better conductor (even better than copper) for the same mass.

          Gold is a very dense metal (about twice as dense as lead) so if you care about mass you probably would not use much of it.