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Mars Base

Asteroid Mining is Possible for $2.6 Billion | How to Mine Asteroids | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-mining-feasibility-study.html

sciByte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • mining asteroids
  • new company Planetary Resources, Inc. plans to do
  • The in-depth study of the feasibility of asteroid mining was prepared for the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Planetary Resources is still years away from actually snatching up an asteroid and staking a cosmic claim
  • What the study did was show that, for the first time in history, this was now feasible using technology available in this decade
  • it appears feasible to identify, capture and return close to Earth an entire asteroid that is roughly 23 feet (7 meters) wide. This so-called near-Earth asteroid (NEA) would weigh in the neighborhood of 500 tons
  • According to the study
  • Placing a 500-ton asteroid in high lunar orbit would provide a unique, meaningful and affordable destination for astronaut crews in the next decade
  • This disruptive capability would have a positive impact on a wide range of the nation’s human space exploration interests. It would provide a high-value target in cislunar space that would require a human presence to take full advantage of this new resource.
  • Such a venture represents a new synergy between robotic and human missions in which robotic spacecraft retrieve significant quantities of valuable resources for exploitation by astronaut crews to enable human exploration farther out into the solar system.
  • Water or other material extracted from a captured volatile-rich near-Earth asteroid could be used to provide affordable spacecraft shielding against galactic cosmic rays. The extracted water could also be used for propellant to transport a shielded habitat.
  • This undertaking could jump-start an entire in situ resource utilization industry. The availability of a multi-hundred-ton asteroid in lunar orbit could also stimulate the expansion of international cooperation in space as agencies come together to determine how to sample and process raw material from an asteroid.
  • may someday have to deflect a much larger near-Earth object
  • the idea of exploiting the natural resources of asteroids dates back over 100 years.
  • the feasibility of this retrieval concept is made possible by three key developments.
  • Firstly, the ability to discover and characterize an adequate number of sufficiently small near-Earth asteroids for mining.
  • Secondly, there is evolving ability to implement sufficiently powerful solar electric propulsion systems to enable transportation of the captured asteroid.
  • Lastly, the proposed human presence in cislunar space in the 2020s both enables exploration and exploitation of the returned near-Earth asteroid.
  • NASA's findings are put in the public domain, as in the earlier cases of communication, weather and navigation satellites, for use by competing commercial enterprises
  • companies can then work to generate revenues — and pay taxes — while lowering the cost of access to resources for the good of all
Mars Base

Planetary Resources Group Wants to Mine Asteroids - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-group-wants-to-mine-asteroids

scibyte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • this company has been in existence for about three years, working quietly in the background, assembling their plan.
  • will initially focus on developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and later, create extremely low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions.
Mars Base

Interesting Facts About Asteroids - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...eresting-facts-about-asteroids

scibyte44 AsteroidMining Asteroid

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • D class asteroids: They are also known as Trojan asteroids of Jupiter and are dark and carbonaceous in composition.
  • C class asteroids: They are found in the Earth’s outer belt and are darker and more carbonaceous than the ones found in the S class.
  • S class asteroids: They are found in the Earth’s inner belt, closer to Mars and are composed of mostly stone and iron.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • V class asteroids: They are a far-out group of asteroids that follow a path between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus, and are made of igneous, eruptive materials.
  • Asteroid composition has been classified in the following way:
Mars Base

Asteroid Miners Wanted to Tap Space Rock Riches | Planetary Resources | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lanetary-resources-hiring.html

sciByte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • One of the reasons that we chose to announce the company at this time is because we're beginning to aggressively search for the world's best engineers, to complement our team
  • looking for engineers to help design and build a fleet of asteroid-mining robots
  • not a motley crew led by Bruce Willis
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • among its investors Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who are worth $16.7 billion and $6.2 billion
  • company's advisers include filmmaker and adventurer James Cameron, former NASA astronaut Tom Jones and MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager
  • Water can be broken into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel
  • platinum-group metals it plans to extract will help lower the cost of many products here on Earth, including hand-held electronic devices and monitors for televisions and computers.
Mars Base

Rare Daytime Fireball Created by Minivan-Size Space Rock | Meteor & Asteroids | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/l-minivan-size-space-rock.html

scibyte44 meteor

shared by Mars Base on 26 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • A meteor in the sky above Reno, Nevada on April 22, 2012.
  • The red bullseye indicates the location where a meteor exploded over California's Central Valley on April 22, 2012. The yellow triangles mark infrasound arrays, which were key in determining the location of the meteor's explosion.
  • fireball occurred just after the peak of the annual mid-April Lyrid meteor shower
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • likely not a Lyrid meteor
  • ]ithout a trajectory, I cannot rule out a Lyrid origin, but I think it likely that it was a background or sporadic meteor
Mars Base

Meteorite Hunters Find Fragments from the Recent 'Daytime Fireball' in California - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...daytime-fireball-in-california

scibyte44 meteor

shared by Mars Base on 26 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Update: NASA and the SETI Institute are asking the public to submit any amateur photos or video footage of the meteor that illuminated the sky over the Sierra Nevada mountains and created sonic booms that were heard over a wide area at 7:51 a.m. PDT Sunday, April 22, 2012.
  • Several other fragments were found, the first one by noted meteorite hunter Robert Ward.
  • if anyone has access to security camera footage taken on April 22, 2012 in the area of the fireball sighting, it may be useful to check them to see if the fireball was visible. “Astronomers could use them to pin down the site of the fall, maximizing the hunt for fragments
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