New Mining Equipment Technology ‐ January 2016
T he advances in mining continue over land, sea, and air, as the global business seeks out ever‐richer veins of ore at the tops of mountains or within the Earth's crust or beneath the waves of the ocean. Yet there's a brand‐new arena for iron mining, one that may prove the most lucrative of all: space. Long the domain of science fiction, space mining increasingly looks not only like a realistic possibility but an exciting future for resource development. There's plenty of resource extraction options to choose from ‐‐ it's believed that Saturn's moon of Titan has more petroleum than all of Earth ‐‐ but current projects focus on mining asteroids. The asteroids whizzing about the Earth and the solar system contain huge quantities of all manner of ore, including iron but also gold, iridium, cobalt, manganese, silver, titanium, and rhodium, to name just a few. How can we begin to draw ore from these asteroids? It's not as far‐fetched as you may think. Prototypes As you may be able to guess from their name, Planetary Resources represents one of the biggest outfits in develop space mining technology and projects. Their most recent development proves to be a groundbreaking advance in the pursuit of asteroid mining, as the company announced that they had successfully developed a prototype of a 3D printed object from the metal dust of asteroids. Harvested from meteors that have fallen in Argentina, Planetary Resources used asteroid particle matter containing iron, nickel, and cobalt (in similar composition to industry‐grade steel) to 3D print a miniature device that mimics a zero‐gravity mining facility. Revealed at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Expo, Planetary Resources will use their 3D printed model to drum up support (both political and financial) of future projects by demonstrating the capability of building a self‐sustaining mining outpost on an asteroid. The continued advancement of private space firms, such as Planetary Resources and
SpaceX, suggests that government space exploration may be on the way out as corporations step in to fill the void. Legalities Resource extraction in space represents, at best, a tricky topic. The United Nations penned an agreement that the Moon would forever be closed to resource extraction to keep it preserved, much as international agreements keep Antarctica from settlement and mining projects. While the agreement in principle is sound, in practice it is less than airtight. Russia's space program aims to build a mining base on the moon in the next twenty years and will spend an estimated ten billion dollars on the project. Likewise, President Obama signed a controversial bill into law in December that allows any individual to own, sell, and mine space objects not currently defended by international agreement. The Moon is currently off‐limits (as well as, for that matter, moon rocks, which are illegal to buy and sell) to prospectors both American and foreign, but asteroids certainly are not. Indeed, the next great Space Race may be the rush to put mining probes onto asteroids before another outfit claims the largest, closest, and richest rocks in our Solar System. Getting There While we think of most asteroids occupying the space between Mars and Jupiter, there are far more asteroids rich with metal that float further in the interior of the Solar System. The Amor group of asteroids, for instance, float between the orbits of Mars and Earth; the famous asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is believed to have been one of the Amor group that fell too close to Earth's gravity well. Indeed, the only asteroid to have ever been landed upon by a probe, the NEAR Shoemaker, was able to be studied due to its close proximity to Earth. Asteroid mining projects, as such, don't need to fly as far out into space as one might think. Planetary Resources recently launched a spacecraft known as the Arkyd‐3R, a testing satellite that will mimic the conditions of an asteroid in order to determine proper power supply, avionics, movement controls, and software that will be necessary in order to harvest ore from incoming and outgoing asteroids. The Arkyd (famously funded by Kickstarter) ran a successful 90‐day mission; the company will now begin to move forward on their next project by targeting specific asteroids coming near to Earth's orbit in order to run diagnostic probes that will orbit and perhaps touch down on ore‐rich asteroids to measure composition and gather data.