The cost of the item is too high.
The price of the item is excessively expensive. and that’s a pretty clear signal that they want to get in on the space gold rush
Space agencies spend a lot of time and money on asteroids, not only to figure out how to avoid getting hit by them, but also to consider the value of the rocks themselves. In fact, several missions have been completed with the sole intention of interacting with asteroids. In this SciShow compilation video, we explore asteroids from every angle, starting with the all-important question: why do we care about them at all?
If we, as a species, ever want to get off this planet, we’re going to need to find stuff we can use to build things and survive in space. Fortunately, there is a lot of it locked up in asteroids. A growing number of people believe that if we want to live in space, we have to mine them.
Most of the asteroids in our solar system are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but there are also over 14,000 NEOS (near-earth objects) that are asteroids floating around a lot closer to home. Right now, we’re most interested in carbonaceous chondrite asteroids, or C-type asteroids. They’re mostly made up of life-friendly stuff like carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen—elements that any future space settlement will need for breathable air and fertilizer for growing crops.
The best thing about C-type asteroids is that they’re basically chunks of clay. So, you’ve got all these organic elements stuck together with water, and in space, water is more valuable than gold. We need to drink it, obviously, but we can also separate it into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel for interplanetary gas stations. Plus, due to its density, water can even protect us from radiation, which is one of the biggest dangers of spending a long time in space.
Launching a single gallon of water from Earth into orbit costs about 83,000 US dollars, not to mention the astronauts have to bring up all the water they’ll need for their entire stay in space. So if we could just mine our water from asteroids, that would be way better.
There are also S-type asteroids, which are made of rocky minerals and some metals, and M-type, which have a bunch of metals. Since they’re both denser than C-type asteroids, they’d be more difficult to mine. But more important than precious metals, they hold materials we need to build machinery or tools in space. Iron, nickel, cobalt, and silicon can make semiconductors and glass, and Platinum Group metals can make ultra-conductive parts that won’t corrode.
Try to imagine anything cooler than putting a 3D printer in space, filling up its cartridges with materials mined from asteroids, and printing out pieces of a space station. So, what’s stopping us? Why is Babylon 5 not already a thing?
Well, the first thing we need to do is survey the asteroids. To do that, we need telescopes—lots of telescopes—like hundreds of them that we can send out to look at our NEOS and tell us what we can find inside of them.
And simple optical telescopes aren’t good enough. We need spectrometers, which are special instruments that can tell us what elements are present in a sample by looking at how they reflect light and heat. Ideally, these telescopes would be able to latch onto an asteroid surface and do a chemical analysis on the spot.
We do have the technology to do that now. Curiosity, the Mars rover, has an onboard lab called the ChemCam for analyzing the composition of Martian soil. But the ChemCam was expensive to build and get to Mars, and it’s one of a kind. Mass-producing hundreds of spectrographic chemistry labs and telescopes and then sending them up into space is not something we know how to do in a cost-efficient way.
There are people working on those instruments though. Two American companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are looking to crack into the asteroid mining business. The country of Luxembourg wants in on the asteroid boom too. It’s offered a 200 million euro line of credit to any asteroid mining company that wants to set up headquarters inside its borders—a pretty clear signal that they want to get in on the space gold rush. In 2007, NASA launched the Dawn spacecraft to explore the two largest objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter: a giant asteroid called Vesta and an icy dwarf planet named Ceres. This marked the first mission to orbit something in the asteroid belt and the first to orbit two bodies besides Earth. One year ago, NASA voted to extend the mission, and today marks the one year anniversary of Dawn’s extended mission. In the last decade, Dawn has taught us much more about Vesta and Ceres than expected, and there are still many more discoveries to come. Vesta and Ceres were chosen as targets because they are so different from each other: Vesta is dense and rocky like the planets closer to the Sun, while Ceres is icy like the smaller worlds in the outer solar system. Don’s mission has traveled 2.8 billion kilometers to get to Vesta, arriving in 2011, and by doing so joins more than a dozen other spacecraft that have navigated safely through the asteroid belt. all end in June 2018 but until then Dawn will keep sending us pictures and data from the dwarf planet
Before Dawn, we already knew a little bit about the asteroid Vesta thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. For example, it was known that it had a massive crater on its South Pole, which was almost as wide as the asteroid itself. If Earth had a crater that big relative to its size, it would fill the entire Pacific Ocean basin. Additionally, the crater had a huge mountain on its edge, which Don eventually confirmed to be about 22 kilometers higher than the surrounding terrain. This made it almost three times taller than Mount Everest and one of the tallest mountains in the entire solar system.
Besides taking some impressive pictures of the crater, one of Don’s biggest accomplishments at Vesta was confirming a hypothesis that some meteorites we found on Earth came from Vesta. Vesta is unusual for an asteroid because it is a lot like a mini planet; it has a liquid metal core, a mantle, and a crust made out of lava, which were able to be figured out using instruments like Hubble. We haven’t seen an asteroid like that anywhere else in the solar system.
About 6% of the meteorites we’ve collected on Earth look a lot like they could be from the different layers of Vesta, and we call them HED meteorites (Howardite, Eucrite, and Diogenite meteorites) based on their composition. Eucrites could have come from the hardened lava on Vesta’s surface, diogenites could have come from the inside of the asteroid, and howardites look like a mix of the two, which could have happened when Vesta’s crater was formed. Don was able to confirm this using its different spectrometers.
After 14 months at Vesta, Dawn packed up its bags and started a 1.5 billion kilometer, almost three-year journey to the dwarf planet Ceres, where it arrived in 2015 and has been there ever since. As Dawn was approaching Ceres, one of the first things noticed were these bright spots, like big shiny reflectors, stuck all over the surface. After analysis, it was determined that these spots were probably magnesium sulfate, or as we call it here on Earth, Epsom salt. The salt deposits were probably created when asteroids smashed into Ceres’ surface, exposing the salt-filled ice that was hidden beneath. Then, the exposed ice turned into a vapor and the salt deposits were left behind.
Dawn also confirmed that Ceres had a lot of water ice, even if it was hiding underneath the surface. In February, Dawn found something that was unexpected: organic molecules, which are the building blocks of life. Although Dawn couldn’t detect exactly what the molecules were, the spacecraft observed tar-like compounds made of carbon and hydrogen on Ceres’ surface in an area of about a thousand square kilometers. The concentration of molecules was so high that it seemed unlikely that the molecules came from an outside source, like an asteroid impact, since the impact usually scatters molecules all over the place. Instead, they probably formed from water and heat-based chemical reactions on Ceres, which could mean it used to have a warm watery environment.
Dawn’s main job, and its extended mission, is to give us a clearer picture of Ceres’ surface and composition. When cosmic rays from the Sun hit Ceres, they create radiation and neutrons that Dawn can use to identify the different molecules on and even underneath the surface. Dawn has done a lot of this during its mission, but since it has been given extra time, it is hoped that the clearest data can be obtained. The mission will officially end in June 2018, but until then, Dawn will keep sending us pictures and data from the dwarf planet.