This Company Wants to Mine Space Rocks - jarvisuppeathe

Arkyd Series 300 – Rendezvous Prospector. [Pic: Planetary Resources]

Asteroids are more than than hunks of rocks floating in space. They are hunks of rocks that could potentially keep tons of multipurpose minerals.

A company titled Planetary Resources officially announced its plans to mine asteroids with unmanned ballistic capsule earlier this week. In a webcast announcement made on Tuesday, the company detailed its plans to launch a telescope within a few years to pick out potential mineral honeypots floating in blank to be remotely mined.

It mightiness sound an as farfetched as a moon colony, but the project has already garnered support from altissimo visibility investors so much as Google co-collapse Larry Thomas Nelson Page and filmmaker James Cameron.

Why, you ask?

Space minelaying could yield another source of Atomic number 78-group of metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, atomic number 77, and platinum) that are in-chief materials used in computers, electronics, and automobiles. These metals can be found planet-side, but World Resources says that they could be found in much greater concentrations and more easy in infinite rocks than in the Earth's impertinence.

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Like anything else involving place-travel, there will atomic number 4 umpteen hurdles to overcome and steps earlier they can start mining an real asteroid. First, Planetary Resources will launch its prospecting ballistic capsule, the Arkyd-100 Series, inside the close 18 to 24 months. The exploratory orbiter will orbit around Globe, pick out potential targets for resource extraction out of the approximately 9,000 proverbial near-Earth asteroids.

Arkyd Series 100 – Leo Infinite Telescope. [Photograph: Planetary Resources]

Afterward the prospecting phase, which itself will take a few years, Unsettled Resources says it will begin excavations with swarms of its Arkyd-300 Series spacecraft. But the company says there are too many variables to give a firm timeline on when the extraction phase would start out.

Beyond providing Earth's population with a "sustainable source" of precious metals, the project could assistant future space exploration. According to the caller, these asteroid extraction sites could represent secondhand atomic number 3 lacrimation and fueling way-stations for deep-space geographic expedition.

"Accessing a pee-rich angulate testament greatly enable the large-scale exploration of the solar system," said Eric Maxwell Anderson, Co-Founder and CO-Chair of Erratic Resources in a release. "In addition to supporting life, water will also be separated into oxygen and H for breathable air and rocket propellant."

[Planetary Resources via Quad]