Posted on 05/25/2017 10:52:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA scientists are outdoing themselves yet again: by reworking the planned route for a robotic mission to a giant asteroid worth $10,000 quadrillion, they’ve managed to cut costs, launch sooner and arrive four years earlier than planned. Not bad.
The Psyche planetoid, measuring 240km (149 miles) in diameter, is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and is made almost entirely of iron and nickel.
At current market prices, such an asteroid, a truly unique object in our solar system, is estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10,000,000,000,000,000,000). That is, if you could successfully tow it into orbit and then mine it (and find someone to buy all of it, of course). For scale, the entire global economy is worth over $74 trillion.
“We challenged the mission design team to explore if an earlier launch date could provide a more efficient trajectory to the asteroid Psyche, and they came through in a big way,” said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, as cited in a NASA press release.
“This will enable us to fulfill our science objectives sooner and at a reduced cost,” he added.
The original launch date for the mission was in 2023 with a scheduled arrival sometime in 2030. With the new trajectory, however, it will launch in the summer of 2022 and arrive at the asteroid belt in 2026.
The key to the galactic shortcut is mindblowing in and of itself: By scrapping a planned gravity boost around the Earth, the team of scientists figured out how to avoid any pit stops or paying the gravity toll in passing too close to the sun.
"The biggest advantage is the excellent trajectory, which gets us there about twice as fast and is more cost effective," said Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe.
Speculation is rife among the NASA team that the asteroid could indeed be the solidified core of a planet.
"It's such a strange object," Elkins-Tanton previously told Global News Canada in January.
"Even if we could grab a big metal piece and drag it back here ... what would you do? Could you kind of sit on it and hide it and control the global resource – kind of like diamonds are controlled corporately – and protect your market? What if you decided you were going to bring it back and you were just going to solve the metal resource problems of humankind for all time? This is wild speculation, obviously."
The Psyche mission craft, built by Space Systems Loral (SSL) in Palo Alto, California, has also been upgraded. Instead of the original design, which featured a four-panel solar array in a straight line on either side of the craft, the new design features a more powerful x-shaped design.
"By increasing the size of the solar arrays, the spacecraft will have the power it needs to support the higher velocity requirements of the updated mission," said SSL Psyche Program Manager Steve Scott.
The Psyche craft is part of NASA's Discovery Program, a series of lower-cost, highly focused robotic space missions that are exploring the solar system. The Psyche mission is only one of exploration, it won’t actually be towing this giant metal ball back to Earth.
More specifically, the mission will investigate whether Psyche is the core of an early planet, how old it is, whether it formed in similar ways to Earth's core, and what its surface is like.
We can’t have nice things because we have to spend all our monies paying off the natives down here.
Probably not. Still very cost-prohibitive.
A NASA engineer once said, “If we had a pile of gold bricks on the moon, we couldn’t afford to bring them back.”
Not until we find an efficient and cheap way of accelerating mass into and out of orbit.
The cost to mine, refine, and transport a product to market is not zero. The overall costs to mine and transport an asteroid’s materials have to be less than the value of the end product to achieve profit and justify the venture.
Materials in the ground are not counted as a reserves, unless there is a established economical extraction process allowing at minimum a return on the investment (ROI).
This is the situation shale oil faced in past episodes when price bbl. dropped due to OPEC manipulation. Extraction costs were eventually reduced enough to allow shale oil production to continue with OPEC oil in the $(50-60) bbl. range.
“””That is, if you could successfully tow it into orbit ...””””
And, once it falls into the gravitational pull of the earth, we will all be rich.
We’d need to engineer a space elevator and a lot of other tech before that becomes feasible. The question is how we survive until then.
I thought the same thing 5 years ago, and at the time I was working with a NASA research agency and had contact with a lot of space people. Was supposed to be right around the corner, but still nothing, relatively speaking. They were going to build a spaceport near Houston, nothing seems to have come of that. Something’s holding it up. Maybe it was osamabama.
“We could build a Death Star!”
The ‘asteroid’ already is a hollowed out transport megalopolis for an alien species who were created by yet a different, highly intelligent species. The inhabitants of the ‘asteroid’ are miners, and they’re coming to Earth to gradually replace humans. The human species has been infected with the liberalism virus, which drastically slowed down the process of mining Earth. There was a need for a new species immune to liberalism, in order to get the mineral extraction process of Earth back up to speed. The internetz sez so.
“...had contact with space people...”
Lol
We’d need to engineer a space elevator and a lot of other tech before that becomes feasible. The question is how we survive until then.
But we do not need a space elevator to exploit resources from space. It is easy to place resources from orbit nearly anywhere on earth. We already know how to do that.
The biggest problem is having the space resources cost less than extracting them from the ground on earth.
That may take a while.
If you could get enough parachutes attached to lower it gently onto an unused expanse of junkland or desert somewhere...
What happens to the tides? What happens if the thing fall out of orbit..or breaks up and starts raining tonnes of space debris...when all of its matter (dont forget the antimatter and dark matter) is on earth..doesnt that increase gravitational pull on sun and moon? Could the moon fall out of orbit? Could the earth heat up cuz it is 1 or 2 millimeters closer to sun?....why 10,000 quadrillion...why not 10 quintillion or 10,000,000 trillion..or 0.010 sextillion
It’s not the presence of the materials, but the energy to process them into a usable form. That is the justification behind seeking a sufficiently enriched ore that enables a mining operation—the energy investment of all the processes.
If not for copper mining also producing silver as a by-product, silver would be properly valued at $90 per troy ounce, the cost of a dedicated silver mine’s operation.
I want the carbon core of a white dwarf star. It’s a giant diamond.....Can’t have it. My ex-wife already owns it.
Try and polish that one...
It’s not the presence of the materials, but the energy to process them into a usable form. That is the justification behind seeking a sufficiently enriched ore that enables a mining operation—the energy investment of all the processes.
It also includes taxes, and overall cash flow. There is no point in putting hundreds of millions into a mine if your net return on investment is less than what you can get from a certificate of deposit.
Exactly.
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