Precious Metals

Science fiction writers and futurists for decades have already reflected on the possibility of extracting minerals from asteroids, but last year, a company called Planetary Resources (or Portuguese, Planetary Resources) declared its intention to perform this task. A group of astronomers from the University of Strathclyde, UK, responded with an emphatic 'yes'. So, identified 12 near-Earth asteroids, which could easily be picked up and exploited with our current technology.

It is believed that asteroids may contain large deposits of precious metals industry. An asteroid a mile could contain up to a million tons of iron ore, nickel, which is three times more than the yield on earth the same area. There is also the possibility of the presence of gold, platinum and other rare substances. The Planetary Resources claims that an object 30 meters with the correct composition, could contain 20-50 billion dollars in platinum.

These figures encouraged the staff of the University of Strathclyde, led by Garcia Yarnos, generating astronomical data on near-Earth objects, to see if any of them could capture. To their surprise, they found 12 small asteroids that pass close enough to Earth and could be trapped in Lagrage points L1 or L2 , for mining operations. The researchers dubbed these asteroids Easily Retrievable Objects, or EROs (Easily Recoverable Objects in Portuguese).

The Lagrange points are regions in space where the gravity of Earth and another celestial body are balanced. If you put something in a Lagrange point, it is static. And it is exactly this point that you want to take an asteroid to begin exploring their ores. The Lagrange points L1 and L2 are the places where the gravity of Earth and Sun are balanced. They are approximately 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, or about four times the distance from here to the moon

The 12 candidates are asteroids in orbits that lead near the Lagrange points L1 or L2, so they only need a little push to lead them to the right spot. Yarnoz and his team estimated that changing the speed of these objects to less than 500 meters per second, it would be enough for that. But an ERO, called 2006 RH120, could be captured by changing its velocity by only 58 meters per second. And this may occur until 2026.

One of the important criteria in the filtering database of 9, 000 near-Earth objects to 12 is that we do not have the technology safe enough to push large asteroids to the Lagrange points. Thus, there will be no mining operation for mega asteroids a kilometer in the near future. Most ROS are identified by the study from 2 to 20 meters, but still large enough to contain a substantial amount of resources.