Tag: asteroid mining

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Ten Things you didn’t know about Asteroid Mining

asteroid value

One of the best things about writing science fiction, is that if you pick an obscure enough occupation for your protagonists, nobody can tell you you got it wrong…

Asteroid mining, for example. There is a little knowlegde about asteroid mining using today’s technology. But… 800 or so years in the future….?

This first appeared on Blogging Authors as part of my tour last March.

10 Things You Might Not Know About Asteroid Mining

By Jemima Pett

1.    Asteroids are currently classed as stony, metal or chondrite. The chondrites are clay and silicate rocks, and are, generally speaking the oldest types of rock in the solar system. Stony types are silicate and nickel-iron; metallic are nickel-iron but with compositional differences related to how far from the Sun they were formed. 

image from universetoday.com 2009/08/infog-high-value-asteroids1

2.    Solar system metallic asteroids are generally up to 80% iron, and the rest a mixture of nickel, iridium, palladium, platinum, gold, magnesium, osmium, ruthenium, rhodium and possibly others.

3.    The Earth company Planetary Resources was set up in 2012 to mine asteroids in space, focusing on the platinum group of metals, but its assets were acquired in 2018. [article]

4.    In 2020 NASA awarded contracts to four companies to ‘extract small amounts of regolith’ (asteroid surface layer) by 2024 [article]

5.    A single 500-meter diameter platinum-rich asteroid can contain more platinum group metals than have been mined on Earth throughout history [citation].

6.    In the Viridian System, asteroids are similarly rich in the (fictitious) metallic element orichalcum.

7.    Orichalcum is used throughout the galaxy for instantaneous communications, regardless of distance. 

8.    Only three other systems are known to have orichalcum deposits, and none in great quantity.

9.    Orichalcum occurs in both large and small quantities in Viridian asteroids; as metal strips (seams or veins), as nuggets within other rocks (like geodes), and as fines (like gold panning).

10.  ‘Raw’ orichalcum has a propensity to draw electrical power from anything too close to it, making extraction a hazardous operation, and one which requires considerable ingenuity to develop the right tools and processes—in the near-vacuum of space.

~~~

If you’ve read the series, you probably know the last five items.

Next month: An interview with Maggie Ingleton

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Asteroid mining – in reality!

Victor Habbick Visions/Space Science Library

I get the email update from New Scientist daily, but irritatingly, some articles, like this one, require you to pay for premium content. Sigh.  Until I make as much from the books as subscribing for premium content costs, I’ll just stick with the snippets.  Like this one…

Victor Habbick Visions/Space Science Library

Asteroid space station

A new analysis suggests we could place a space station inside a rotating asteroid to provide artificial gravity for mining equipment, digging from the inside out. If you want to remove chunks of precious rock from an asteroid, you can’t just land and jackhammer it: most of them have such weak gravity that a hammer or digger is likely to just bounce off into space. But if the asteroid is spinning, that would create artificial gravity, a force that acts from the inside of the rock outwards. Working in a cavity below ground would also protect the mining rig from dangers on the asteroid’s surface, particularly radiation.

Click the heading to go to the New Scientist page online.

My writing

I recently wrote somewhere that I do write what I know, and I know as much about life on the other side of a wormhole as anyone.  I think that still stands.  But as this article indicates, some people know more than me about mining asteroids.

I like the ideas in this snippet.  That may indeed be what I imagine for Excelsior, without having actually specified a space-station in the middle, and I think the tunnels there have a breathable atmosphere.

Fortunately, I have always had Lars and Pete hammering away inside tunnels in the VS asteroids.  I’ve blipped how they make the tunnels, though.  The colour in that graphic would fit the Viridian System, although the surface suggest the asteroid might be an iron one.

I eventually cut a mining accident from Curved Space to Corsair.  I must let you have it as a short story some time.

Picture of the asteroid from Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library and sourced from the New Scientist website article.

Comment on my stinginess.  I used to subscribe to New Scientist.  It’s a weekly magazine full of astounding and wonderful science that I’m interested in.  It’s also authoritative. And the copies mounted up, unread. I had two years worth of unread magazines when I moved here. I kept them for ten years. The same is now happening to the bird and wildlife magazines that come monthly with my memberships.

There is only so much reading a person can do a week.