New Spectroscope Perfect For Asteroid Mining, Planetary Research (vanderbilt.edu) 56
Science_afficionado writes: Scientists at Fisk and Vanderbilt Universities are developing a new generation of gamma-ray spectroscope that is light weight, compact and don't require much power but have the capability for detecting veins of gold, platinum, rare earths and other valuable materials hidden within asteroids, comets, moons and other airless objects floating about the solar system. "A gamma-ray spectroscope records the intensity and wavelengths of the gamma rays coming from a surface. This spectrum can be analyzed to determine the concentration of a number of important, rock-forming elements ... The key to the new instrument is a recently discovered material, europium-doped strontium iodide (SrI2). This is a transparent crystal that can act as an extremely efficient gamma-ray detector. It registers the passage of gamma rays by giving off flashes of light that can be detected and recorded."
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No, there's no way to do so now. However, it's a potentiality some day in the future. There's no good reason to not look for advances and speculate that they may be beneficial for those reasons in the future. I'm not sure *why* we'd want to mine asteroids but my imagination isn't that good. If we have sufficiently advanced technology to get to asteroids and mine them, we probably have technology that's advanced enough to get off this rock.
Getting off this rock, in a meaningful fashion, means getting off it
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Well, yeah. Someday .. Maybe. But sixty years into the space age, progress is slow. So space mining may well not happen for centuries. Moreover, my cocktail napkin says that the ore value of a 1000kg chunk of typical nickel-iron meteorite is probably around USD $2000-$3000 at current prices. (The curiousity value is much higher, so the first few might fetch a LOT of bucks). AFAICS, at the moment we couldn't even get 1000kg down from earth orbit in an orderly fashion for $20000-$30000 much less the $2
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That's an overly simplistic view of asteroids. First off, we already know very well from spectroscopy that asteroids sometimes (if not usually) have varied surface material properties. Hence it seems perfectly reasonable
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Your argument would be a lot stronger if you could point to some meteorites showing veins of gold, or platinum, or rare earths or indeed anything. As far as I know there aren't any. But I'm not an expert on meteorites
Yes nickel-iron meteorites are enhanced in some heavy elements. e.g. Indium. But it appears, nowhere near as much as the most concentrated terrestrial ores. My $2000-3000 value includes about $100 worth of heavy metals Gold, Platium Group, etc. The rest is the value of the nickel and iro
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Forget about veins - even in bulk some S-type meteorites have been measured at over 100ppm platinum-group metals, several times better than the best mine on Earth (last I checked, about 40ppm), let alone typical mines for platinum-group metals on Earth, which range from a couple hundred ppb to a few ppm. Concerning precious metals as a whole, even the *average* H-chondrite is 28ppm precious metals [outofthecradle.net]. L-chondrites can be up to 220 ppm precious metals. And there's no overburden - it's rich all the way through.
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I actually agree with much of that. Assuming you can find suitable material, the problems of getting it back to near earth cheaply are probably tractable. Especially if you are patient and use "free" solar radiation for your energy sources. But getting the payload near Earth with an optimum velocity vector may turn out to be a tricky problem that'll take a long time to work out.
"If they're shaped and sized properly you can have a stable reentry with minimal ablative burnoff and remain relatively intact a
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Propulsion: electrical energy will be free; so will particles that can be ejected as reaction mass. Assuming we need particles at all. Ergo, free propulsion can be had.
Transport vehicles: With what effectively amounts to unlimited amounts of nickle-iron available, material for transport packaging can also be had for free.
Labor: Robotics, specifica
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I'm not normally presumptuous but, if I may speculate, this seems to have been come trendy. Somewhat recently, we've become "space nutters." I'm not sure how, or why. They make strange assumptions, such as holding a belief that I expect to see this sort of stuff happen in my lifetime or in the near future. The above poster shows that they want immediacy.
To be honest, I don't even care about direct practicality. As a society, we're spending a trivial amount. I think it's fine to do pure research or specializ
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And if we could somehow get past this need to always generate profits now and take a longer term view of things, we could undertake long term projects that will produce profits 25, 50, or 100 years from now. E.g. moving whole asteroids nearer to Earth – slowly – where we can get to them more easily.
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Re:Yeah, and? (Score:4, Insightful)
SIxty years into the railroad age, we were still using rather primitive steam locomotives.
Forty years later, the early automobiles were on the roads (such roads as existed).
Fifty years after that, we were taking our cars to the airport....
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Your post is not moderated highly. That is unfortunate. You were more succinct than I. Of course, your post requires that they put a little thought into this instead of parroting trendy ideas. That makes a response unlikely, so I figured I would take a moment to thank you. 'Snot like I was doing anything better.
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Hmm... I guess 'loads' works. Do you mean 'lodes,' however? Anyhow, you said a lot of things but nothing. Pfft... I bet you don't even have a cocktail napkin handy!
Anyhow... Where was I? Oh, yeah, err... Speculating at the rate of progress is a self-fulfilling prophecy if, of course, people listen and/or think as you. Assuming the 'vt' means Vermont, well, you fit the codger part. Or curmudgeon.
I, for one, celebrate the invention and hope that, someday, we'll make a clear choice to keep a few of us humans a
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The point of space mining not to bring materials down to earth. It's to use it in space based manufacturing plants in order to eliminate launching raw material up from earth. Once we have kickstarted the manufacturing process it should make further space missions far cheaper.
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Moreover, my cocktail napkin says that the ore value of a 1000kg chunk of typical nickel-iron meteorite is probably around USD $2000-$3000 at current prices.
So that's worth around $8,002,000 delivered to orbit, based on Falcon 9 launch prices. The point of asteroid mining isn't to deliver to Earth, but to deliver to orbit. Planetary Resources in particular is targeting selling water to NASA [planetaryresources.com] at less than launch cost.
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Two technological processes are converging here. Space robotics is getting better fast, and the easy source mineral deposits on Earth are gone. In high gravity, boring into the ground at depth gets exponentially expensive after the first two or three kilometers. In the TauTona mine in South Africa, the sheer heat of the rock at 4 km has become a major barrier to going deeper. And in most other parts of the planet, stability of the rock and local earthquake frequency prevents going even that deep.
This conver
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Compare Curiosity Rover with the initial Viking landers. That's how far we have come with robotics, just on Mars. Then compare it to the first lunar landers.
And when we get out there to mine asteroids, we will want to use teleoperators, not autonomous robots: a small human crew onsite directing a fleet of mining machines. The technology race will be between life supports for humans and the local AI that fully autonomous robots on location would require.
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Interesting... To what end? The only end that I can see, that has anything other than research value, is processing the ore in space in order to build with it and that seems like it'd be making it more complex than it needs to be. I don't see this being financially viable for a very long time - if at all, if the goal is to return it to the Earth's atmosphere and then process it. I'd say it'd be great, on a small scale, for research but I'm not sure that it's something we'll be doing on a large scale for pro
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Yeah just like going faster than 30 miles per hour would tear your head off. And there is no way a heavier than air object could fly.
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Living forever will never be possible. But living for 1000 years might be. Mining asteroids is much easier than living for 1000 years. I would be surprised if in 50 years, there won't be at least 5 extraterrestrial mining companies.
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Why will living forever never be possible?
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The fact that we cannot yet see how or why we woulld mine these bodies is not a good guide to the futue. All advances build on those that went before. Practical, cheap ways to prospect for rare minerals off earth may well be a necesary link in the chain. I would also note that the new technique may be valuable in future rover missions to places like Titan.
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If Luddite butthurt prevents us from getting at better sources of energy or materials, it's not just hot air - it's a greenhouse gas
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We surely can see how and why. Asteroids have (generally) tiny gravitational fields. By and large, the delta-V needed to return material from an asteroid to Earth is just its earth-intercept delta-V. Which on some asteroids - earth-crossers - this energy can be tiny itself. At earth, the body can either aerocapture or go all the way in for landing. Neither of these things require an engine. There is of course the heat load to deal with. Your projectiles can be ideally shaped for reentry and with the outer
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As if we haven't been extensively working on both of those things already (staying grounded on low-gravity bodies and automating robotic systems - and no, "fully automated" is not needed, there's nothing preventing the use of ground controllers on Earth).
So your conception is that one would only mine when an a
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Large mines on Earth also cost "billions upfront" - your point?
While at the same time the easiest resources become exhausted. Also, "technology gets better" often means "exploiting radically new mineral sources that were previously unavailable to you".
Right, who needs extremely hard materials that tolerate very high wear? Who needs chemicals used in fingerpri
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Because that's what you so kindly mentioned: "technology gets better". If you'd rather stick to using the same technology over and over while the easiest resources exhaust, that's otherwise known as committing yourself to ever-increasing resource prices.
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"Gold, platinum, iridium, rhodium, osmium, indium and palladium hover in the rough ballpark of $10000-60000 USD per kilogram; gem-quality peridot about the same"
You face a double-barrelled problem.
1: Space is currently expensive enough that recovering any of these materials is uneconomic even if there were ingots stacked on an asteroid (or the moon) awaiting collection.
2: Supply and demand. As soon as you start landing significant quantities of these materials the price will tumble.
The logical target market
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Your correct shipping minerals down the gravity well is a bit pointless.
The value is in manufacturing further up the gravity well or anyplace with a reasonably low escape velocity. So orbital and more probably moon based. That is of course a chick/egg issue since were currently stuck in LEO with that money pit that is the ISS and a timid NASA.
Firstly, it is perfect for doing research (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly, it is of course perfect for doing research, and for learning more about asteroids, comets, moons, etc.
This is primarily about research, and I guess that the researchers had to show to the people who give the grant how this could one day make money - hence the story about asteroid mining. Media then pick up on the mining, and run with it.
And then it comes to the grumpy old people here on this website, who will just comment negatively on anything that is not in their own direct personal interest. It's a pity to read that some here think that everything that does not advance our economy tomorrow is a waste of money.
Maybe I can do it with a divining rod (Score:2)
seen one of these before... (Score:2)
We've got an early version of an assembler [wikipedia.org] in the works. now all we need are conveyors [wikia.com]. Anyone working on those?
Veins unlikely... (Score:1)
Re:Veins unlikely... and another thing... (Score:1)