Asteroid mining will only become possible after scientists begin to better understand the behavior of small celestial bodies and compile a list of relatively slow objects where the miners can reach, said a group of 30 astronomers who spoke at the EPSC planetary conference in Riga.
“Asteroid mining is an amazing mixture of science, engineering, entrepreneurship and imagination. The problem is that this is another young science in which each new discovery poses more questions than answers,”said Jose Galache, a planetary scientist from Harvard (USA).
Now two commercial companies intend to extract resources on asteroids - Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. The first has already launched several test vehicles that have worked out part of the asteroid capture technologies in late 2014 and early 2015. In collaboration with DSI, NASA is developing its own technology for capturing small celestial bodies as part of a project to prevent them from colliding with the Earth.
These projects have already attracted the attention of the governments of the United States and Luxembourg. The American Congress recently lifted all restrictions related to the extraction of resources in space, and the Luxembourg authorities have announced their readiness to support such undertakings financially.
The rapid development of such plans, as Galache said, posed the question of where and how resources can be extracted in space before businessmen and scientists. Last year, 30 leading planetary scientists, engineers and geologists listened to requests from DSI and Planetary Resources and tried to assess how feasible such initiatives are and where they are best implemented.
The main conclusion of scientists is that it is in principle possible to implement such projects, but now it is extremely difficult to do this due to the huge number of white spots in the sciences related to the study of the behavior of asteroids.
For example, the behavior of the lion's share of near-Earth asteroids, potentially of commercial interest or a threat to such projects, remains unknown to science, as well as their origin. In addition, scientists now do not have reliable tools for determining the chemical composition of asteroids and their structure, which is extremely important in the context of mining on them.
An even more serious problem is that physicists do not yet know how bulk materials behave in the absence of attraction or in microgravity. Many asteroids and comets, as noted by Galache, consist of stuck together dust grains and ice particles, and an attempt to drill through their surface can result in an avalanche or other natural disasters that can damage or destroy the mining robot.
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All these problems, as the authors of the report note, must be resolved before space startups can start mining in space. Many of them are of a fundamental nature, and only the support of science and the scientific study of asteroids using probes like Hayabuse-2 and OSIRIS-REx will help solve this problem.