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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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NASA Asteroid Mission -- Metals "Worth" Ten Thousand Quadrillion Dollars
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Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection.
-- '76 Olympics
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 20 2017, @04:17AM
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.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday January 20 2017, @05:27AM
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. ;-)
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 20 2017, @08:21PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Informative) by frojack on Sunday January 22 2017, @08:14PM
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.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.