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.
It could be used as an umbrella to stop global warming!................
Ya mean like BIGLY...I mean BIG LEAGUE huge?
Bringing all that mass to earth will cause the gravitational attraction of the sun to increase and thus produce cooling.
Asteroid capture is the certain care for global warming
LOL! You have got it! BIGLY, BIG LEAGUE, YEWG! Big time BOOM! It will be a BLMOAB: Big League Mother Of All Bombs. Today’s Yoga: practice my duck and cover under the desk.
Think bigger! That's much less we have to transport INTO space. That much iron and nickel would sustain development operations in near-Earth orbit and wouldn't have to be tugged into space in the first place.
The initial investment required would be high, but once the mining, refining, and development infrastructure are in place, they could build space ports, space planes, orbital habitats, satellites, etc.
That’s a pretty small payload. Put it near L1 or L2 Lagrange point, and it’s close enough to mine but not close enough to present a threat to any low-Earth orbit satellites.
It would be little threat to Earth or our moon. We would control the insertion burns, and I can tell you that the math, while insanely complex, is pretty solid.
“The law of supply and demand applies. If you flood the market with a billion tons of high quality ore, the price will go down to near nothing.”
On the other hand, having the cost of iron, nickel, copper, titanium, gold, and silver drop to near nothing would be a tremendous economic boost. Want to build a space city? Spin it for ‘gravity’ and give it really thick walls? No problem.
The production costs vs expected returns is what makes it uneconomical.
Based on my own calculations, referring to the law of supply and demand and based on projected future market prices should such a new supply become available, I estimate the asteroid (and all other iron and nickel) to be worth approximately $1.32. However I could be off by up to $1.
Hire Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Willis to steal it.
Drag a gigantic asteroid near the Earth? What could possibly go wrong?
The iron isn’t worth all that much, scrap prices here are about 3 cents a pound...................
They could put it in an orbit just outside earth’s orbit by a million miles or thereabouts.
Then Earth would pass it every year or so...................
Absolutely. If we're going to survive as a species, we're going to have to make use of the resources the Lord placed in our immediate neighborhood. Sadly, the biggest problem with actually exploiting these resources, other than the technical issues of doing the actual work of course, is that there is currently a treaty signed on to by most nations that says that these resources are the property of "mankind" or some such blather. The idea being that any profits would have to be divided amongst the various and sundry nations of the earth, not the people who actually take the risk and harness the resources. It's similar to the Law of the Sea treaty that we (the U.S. still hasn't signed onto yet. The Law of Space treaty will destroy any attempt to gather the resources of the asteroids, at least until it is done away with.
We could easily end the practice of 'strip mining' on this planet if we brought one of these mineral rich asteroids into a lunar orbit (I wouldn't recommend a solar orbit for obvious reasons). The Lagrange points would probably be good choices as well. Of course, the "environmentalists" will never sign on for this, because what they are really opposed to is capitalism.
Imagine how cheap iron will be when there is an asteroid of this size filled to the rim being mined! Basically that market will collapse. Meaning the mining will stop because it’s economically not worth it. Then price will rise until mining operations are sustainable and then fall until they are right on the edge. Then you have equiibrium and prices will stabilize. Low, low, low!
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