By While asteroids are rich sources of precious and valuable materials, scientists still haven’t fully committed to mining them.
An artist’s illustration of the Psyche spacecraft visiting 16 Psyche.(Supplied: NASA/JPL)
On Oct. 13, 2023, NASA launched a mission to 16 Psyche, a huge, metal-rich asteroid about six years away, to learn more about how planetary interiors form.
The asteroid has a jaw-dropping estimated monetary value: $100,000 quadrillion. That’s because 16 Psyche is a literal goldmine, contain rare elements essential to cars and electronics, like platinum and palladium.
To explore — and maybe settle — space, we’ll need extraterrestrial sources of materials. Companies such as AstroForge and TransAstra are already seeking for building mines on asteroids like Psyche. But how close are we to mining them and reaping their cosmic treasures?
Technologically speaking, we’re really close, said Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida. The only difference between mining on an asteroid versus on Earth is the requirement for tools that can withstand low-gravity, high-radiation conditions. The tool also needs to be able to function autonomously — it could take 20 minutes or more for a radio wave with directions to reach an asteroid, especially if it’s on the other side of the sun.
All that technology has already been developed and verified in a laboratory setting, but it’s not properly ready for application, Metzger said. On NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels scale, which ranges from 1 to 9, our current tool for space mining is between a 3 and a 5.
Any development toward asteroid mining will probably come from the private sector, said Kevin Cannon, an assistant professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines’ Space Resources Program. But there’s at least one potential hurdle: describing to potential investors why we should mine asteroids in the first place.
“So, for instance, if we bring out water from [a] water-rich asteroid, we could divide that apart into hydrogen and oxygen, and use that as rocket propellant to refuel spacecraft,” Cannon said. Metals mined from asteroids, meanwhile, could be converted into large structures in space.
Credit: NASA
That make another question: Why not just mine the moon? All of the materials we’d want to mine from asteroids also present there, albeit in lower concentrations. And, of course, it’s much closer.
The profit from the moon is, it’s just few days away from earth, Cannon said. “Even these near-Earth asteroids that people talk about, if you consider how long it takes to wait for the orbits [between the asteroids and Earth] to line up, which you need to get back, it’s many hundreds of days.” Psyche, with its $100,000 quadrillion bounty, will take years to reach, with first contact occur approximately in 2029.
Even if we aren’t prepared to mine asteroids, researchers are still curious in exploring these space rocks. Less than a month before the Psyche mission launched, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft came back from its mission to the asteroid Bennu, with samples in tow. In 2020, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 returned with samples from the asteroid Ryugu, before taking off to explore two other asteroids: 2001 CC21 and 1998 KY26. And in October, the European Space Agency will launch a mission to the asteroid Hera.
