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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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(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday January 20 2017, @09:49AM
We got no business dicking around with orbiting large bodies of solid metal that we can't control.
If those bodies are bumbling about in some safe orbit past Mars then yes, I'd say you have a good point. However in the event that such a body was hurtling towards us and threatening global extinction then we have every business.
Personally I think trying to move something that size in one go would be way beyond our current capabilities and potentially catastrophic. If we want to mine this thing we need to fly out there, set up a mining (and possibly also manufacturing) base on it and ship the resulting materials to where they are needed. When we have a few decades of experience and tech development from that, maybe we can think about playing planetary billiards.