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What are the different kinds of asteroids? What are they made of? How can we send missions to capture them, and what will we do once we get one? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

16. Psyche is an asteroid. It was discovered in 18 52 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparri. It was the 16th asteroid to be discovered. Hence the name. It's it's relatively large, about 100 20 miles across and alone accounts for about 1% of the total mass of the asteroid belt. Psyche orbits the sun at about three a U and takes around five years to complete an orbit 16. Psyche is pretty lumpy. If you went out in the woods and picked up a generic rock and scaled it up to be 100 and 20 miles across, you'd have a pretty good picture of what this asteroid looks like. 16 Psyche is unlike most asteroids, it's highly reflective as an albedo of around 30% which makes it around three times brighter or more reflective than the moon, the surface and presumably the rest of it, because we actually haven't gone inside of it. But based on what we know of the surface and its mass and its density, it's composed of 90% metals, mostly iron and nickel.

How did 16 psyche come to be? Well, we think that in the early days of the solar system. Like before there was even a solar system. There was just a bunch of rocks flying around, slowly gluing themselves together. Some of them grew up to go on and become planets like Earth and Jupiter and others. Well, didn't either. They never got to be a part of a planet in a in the first place, or they were starting to form a plan. They were making a proto planet or planet Testim, and they were just getting on it, and something smashed into it and broke it apart. When planets form and they're all hot and molten, the heavy stuff sinks to the core and the lighter stuff floats to the surface. That's why, like the Earth, we have iron in our core and nitrogen in our atmosphere, and the same thing happens to planet decimals. And then when they get smashed up, you know, some of the rocks are from the lighter end from the surface, and then some of the rocks are from the core.

So we think 16 psyche is a fragment of a core of a proto planet or planet decimal left over from when the solar system was just starting. It never got to be a full on planet, and it was just left hanging out there in the asteroid belt with all the rest. I suppose I should mention that it's estimated that 16 psyche contains around 10 billion billion kg of nickel and iron. Nickel and iron are used on the Earth for all sorts of things, like batteries and medical devices and mobile phones and kitchen tools and plating and reinforced concrete and cars and buses and ships and bridges and aircraft. If we maintained our current use of nickel and iron, then 16 psyche would supply our needs for several million years alone. This is one of the reasons that asteroid mining is so tantalizing now.

Mining on the earth isn't exactly easy. Yeah, there's tons of iron and nickel in the earth. There's more iron and nickel in the Earth than there is in 16 psyche. But because of that differentiation process, it happened here too. So all of our nickel and iron is, or most of it is on the core. What we have up here is just, you know, the light stuff that nobody cares about. Um, well, I mean, I care about it, but but not in terms of mining, like there's a bunch of silicates in oxygen in H2O, you know, like lame stuff. Not We want the good stuff, the good metal stuff. But that sunk way down into our mantel and core. Because of this process that we call differentiation. What metals we do have near the surface of the Earth were deposited here by asteroids like early in the history of the earth. When we were just getting around to being a planet, we were slammed by asteroids. We were slammed by commissars, a big event called the late heavy bombardment, which was, like, 3.8 billion years ago.

Something like that. And it was a nasty place to be. Comets delivered a whole bunch of water and asteroids delivered a whole bunch of metal, and those metals are near the surface of the earth. Some of it has been churned down into our mantle, and some of it has been brought back up from the mantle and and you know, so there are these veins of ores that we can dig up, But mining is dangerous. It is expensive. It's kind of horrible for the environment, and there's only a finite number of resources like think like think of the the precious metals that we like to dig up out of the ground. Phosphorus, antimony, zinc, tin lead, iridium, silver, gold, copper. You know it's all the stuff that makes modern life so modern. But like take zinc, for example, there are only so many atoms of zinc available on the Earth. There are only so many atoms right up to the surface where you can just reach over and grab a big handful of zinc, or you dig a few feet down and you get some more zinc.

There's only so much zinc that if you dig like a mile down, you can get to all the zinc. And yeah, that's presumably. There's a lot of zinc in the core, but good luck getting into that. But even if you tapped every single possible resource of zinc on the Earth, there's only so much zinc, and it's easy to imagine as populations grow As technologies develop, we end up using more zinc because we need more zinc. We like zinc like there are more people that need zinc in their cell phones. There are more cell phones now or than there are new uses of zinc like, Hey, now we got we zinc in our microphones or zinc in our tap water, and we drink it for the health benefits, you know, whatever. And we end up using more zinc as time goes on, but zinc is a finite resource. So what are our options? If we start running out of zinc, one is to recycle. And if you throw away some zinc, there's gonna be someone to dig it out of the trash and put it somewhere else. And maybe, instead of you know, those stores that say we buy gold, you know, maybe there'll be stores that will say, We buy zinc.

You know, imagine a future 20 years from now, when we're running out of zinc, there's a zinc crisis, and zinc markets are hot. Price of zinc is going out of control. Well, hey, if if if the price of zinc is going up because it's finding more uses, it's becoming more scarce, their profits will go up. So there will be more people willing to dig, dig deeper or harder or longer to find more deeper deposits of zinc like, you know before, Well, we got all the zinc that's within 500 ft of the surface and that we there's more zinc. That's a that's 1000 ft under the surface, but it's super hard to get to, so I don't know what we're gonna do. But now that zinc is super expensive, No. Now we now it's worth the investment. Or maybe we find alternatives for zinc. Instead of putting zinc everywhere, we we use something else. Cantle them. I don't know. We've been in these kinds of cycles for a long time, and we'll continue to do so as long as zinc is a finite resource. As long as any metal is a finite resource and there's only so many atoms, there's only so much zinc like like check this out.

This is amazing gold. The total amount of gold mined throughout the entirety of human history would fill up. I think it's something like five Olympic swimming pools. That's it. Which yeah, yeah, Olympic size swimming pools are large, but imagine five of them and think of the thousands, potentially tens of thousands of years that we've been digging up gold, and that's all the gold we have, That's it. And that same, those same atoms of gold get circulated around and around. Sometimes they're jewelry. Uh, sometimes they're part of a circuit board, you know, You know, sometimes they're a little gold fleck on a wall decoration. You know, it's like we we're using the same gold atoms over and over as such a finite resource. So we have to keep coming up with clever ways to use use it or use less of it or replace it. But what if a bajillion tons of zinc just floated down from the sky? What would happen then? Presumably, the price of zinc would drop, because now zinc is as easy to get as water. You don't have to go have these big, expensive mining operations to get your zinc.

You can just walk out and grab a handful of it. It's right there on the ground for anyone to have so zinc mining would shut down and the zinc mining industry would crash. Anything that already uses zinc would be cheaper, so everything like your your cell phone would be five cents cheaper because now zinc is free and people will come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use zinc like like we. We can't even think of applications for zinc right now that are crazy and off the wall because it's expensive. But if, like, if zinc were cheaper than paper, then we would print the daily news on slabs of zinc instead of slabs of paper. It seems like like imagine what that world would be like if all of our metal resource needs could just be met. Like what if we had infinity of every metal we could ever possibly want? Not just zinc, gold and platinum antimony, iridium silver. So all these applications for all these metals that make our modern life possible?

What if there was an infinity of them or in essentially infinity supply? Well, it's right up there in the sky, isn't it? You just have to get on past the orbit of Mars, and there is more metal in a single asteroid than the entire crust of the earth, and it's just sitting there. Some asteroids have more gold than we've ever dug up in all of human history. It's just sitting there right there. There's just a rock. You can point to it. You can look at it with your binoculars, and right there there's there's more metals than we could possibly know what to do with. How would that transform society? As an aside, this is why alien invasion scenarios never make sense to me. Anything you want on the Earth, you can find in excess in the asteroid belt, and it's way easier to get. But that's No one wants to watch a movie about aliens invading the asteroid belt, I suppose. So. Let's go prospecting There's gold and then our asteroids, like literally gold. OK, there are these rocks, these asteroids that are full of metals, gobs of it.

If you want to get the gold or the zinc or whatever, you have a few challenges. Challenge number one. You have to pick a target. There are different kinds of asteroids, and not every asteroid is easy pickings. The most common kind of asteroid is called C type, or chondr. And yes, we're getting into the realm of astronomy jargon, which, as usual, makes very little sense and was decided upon well before we understood what was going on. Sea type, which stands for Chondroit, is the most common. It's made of clays and silicates and lots of water. It's lots of like crustal material, like if you. If you scooped up a big chunk of the Earth's crust and then squished it into a ball and flung it into orbit, you'd have basically AC type asteroid. There's another type called S type. S is for stony. It's made of silicates like the C type, but there's some nickel iron. Uh, you know, a few more metals than the C type. Um, you know, a typical small S type here. A typical small stony type will have over a million pounds of regular metals and £100 of rare metals like platinum and gold.

So if you came upon a typical typical S type asteroid that's like a few 100 ft across, you'll have a million pounds of regular metals and £100 of rare metals. OK, there's also the P type. This is patreon type that's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter to help keep this show going. And once again, astronomers made this label before anyone understood what was going on. But is your contributions so I can keep this show going and the last type is M type M for metal. At least this naming scheme is straightforward, folks. At least it's It's among the naming schemes that we have encountered in this show. This is at least like kind of makes sense. C type, S type and M type M type, mostly nickel and iron. They're like the S type, only more so they have about 10 times the metals of an S type. There are approximately a lot of asteroids in the solar system. Most of them are concentrated in the asteroid belt. This is the region of our solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid belt. If you put it all the asteroids together and glue them together, it'd be like less than like a half the mass of the moon. There's like nothing there. This isn't Star Wars where you have to. To get through the asteroid belt, you have to zig zag, go up and down. Oh, it's like if you're standing on a typical asteroid, the nearest neighbor is like 100 million miles away. It is thin out there. We think the asteroid belt is there because Jupiter is just past it, and the gravity of Jupiter prevented a planet from forming at that orbit. So you can blame Jupiter for the existence of the asteroid belt. There are other pockets of asteroids. Uh, there are some asteroids that follow and lead in the orbit of the planets. Like Jupiter has this group called the Trojans. And it's from a a balance of gravitational forces. You get these groups? Uh, the Earth also has groups of asteroids that follow and lead it in its orbit. These are called the Apollos. There are also asteroids that just do their own thing that aren't part of a belt or a Trojan group.

Uh, they just they just go around. Some of these are called Near Earth Asteroid. Basically, any asteroid that crosses within the orbit of the Earth is called a near Earth asteroid. They're all over the place, and there's a lot of them, like there's a small number of very, very large ones, and then an innumerable number of very small ones. M type are the juiciest ones when it comes to mining. Because these have all the heavy metals, they have the rare metals. They have the regular metals. This is what they have 16. Psyche is an M type asteroid. It's got a lot of stuff. They're the most valuable by far, like pound for pound. You get your most bang for the buck out of an M type asteroid. But of course, they're the rarest because these are leftover bits of planetary cores and planetary cores are relatively small and relatively rare. You know, compare the core of the earth to the mantle and crust of the earth. And that's what we're talking about. There's a way more C type, these chondrites running around than the M types. So if you want to go mining on an asteroid, you need to find an M type and you need to find an M type that is easy to get to, you know?

Yeah, like, yeah, you could just go to 16 psyche Oh, whoop 16 psyches like on the other end of the solar system. The far edge of the asteroid is, like, hard to get to. So you want a near earth asteroid something that's easy to access? But then but then you gotta find it. You gotta cann all these asteroids. You need dedicated telescopes you need to observe like the first job when it comes to asteroid prospecting is just observing, like having dedicated telescopes, monitoring asteroids, trying to do spectroscopy, trying to get their properties, trying to get their compositions. You have to pin down their locations and their orbits, which are constantly changing because they're small, so they're constantly interacting with each other gravitationally, they can be unevenly heated on one side, then the other, which changes their orbits like they're spinning. It's very annoying. This is why asteroid tracking is such a pain in the neck. So you gotta do it. You gotta find a good target before I continue. I want to let you know that this episode of Ask a Spaceman is brought to you by my friends at better help.

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That's better. Help HE LP dot com slash spaceman Now back to our Astro Thera session brought to you by not a licensed psychologist but an astrophysicist, but good enough, right, at least for now. But let's say you do. Let's say you found an asteroid. It's an M type. It's relatively large. It's got a good orbit. It's easy to get to now. Your second challenge is to get to it and the big word here when we're talking about asteroid mining. The big word we're gonna use today is Delta V Delta V. So V stands for velocity. This is how fast you're going, the direction you're going and Delta the Greek letter Delta. It looks like a little triangle. This is used in physics to mean change. So if I write Delta V in the physics universe, this means change in velocity. Like how much is my velocity going to have to change to get from one place to another?

What is my Delta V? And we care about changes in velocity because in space everything's moving constantly all the time. Nothing is still. We're here on the surface of the earth. We're traveling with the earth. We want to get to an asteroid. The asteroid is traveling in a different orbit with a different speed. We have to match the speed of the asteroid in order to get to it. You know, traveling in space is not like a road trip where you're at rest and then you accelerate and you cruise and then you slow down. It's it's not that. Imagine a road trip where the cities themselves are traveling at 100 miles an hour in different directions. So yes, you have to get out of one city. You have to accelerate. But it's not just a matter of stopping. It's a matter of stopping relative to your target. It's a matter of matching speeds with your new target. So, for example, to give you some numbers to get from the surface of the earth to low earth orbit, you need a delta V of around eight kilometers per second. You know, that's like 17,000 MPH.

You need to go from 0 to 17,000 or 0 to 8 kilometers per second to get yourself to orbit. Now, if you want to go from Earth orbit to a typical near earth asteroid, you need an additional delta V. An additional change in velocity of around 5.5 kilometers per second. This is nice. This is intriguing because to get to the surface of the moon, you need an additional 6.3 kilometers per second. And to get to the surface of Mars, you need an additional eight kilometers per second. So if I'm looking for targets in the solar system to do some digging around, asteroids aren't so bad. Why? Because they don't have a lot of gravity on their own. Like to get to the surface of Mars. That's a hall because you have to get over to Mars, you have to match its speed, and then you have to land on the surface, which is such a pain in the neck. Same for the moon. Asteroids are a little bit easier. Even though they're farther away than the moon and Mars, they actually require less energy to get to.

And that's why we care so much about the Delta. V is is That's the energy that's a fuel. In order to change your velocity in order to match the speed of these objects, you need to burn. You need rockets, you need engines and you need fuel. So Delta V equals fuel and fuel equals cost. So, yeah, it's cheaper to get to a typical near earth asteroid than it is to get to the moon or Mars. But cheaper doesn't mean cheap. To get from the surface of the Earth to low earth orbit, you need eight kilometers per second. You need another 5.5 like another 50 60% of that to get to the asteroid That's a lot of fuel. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of energy. That's a lot of investment. Depending on your asteroid target, you need to optimize. If you have a few options you need to optimize for the kind of asteroid you want. Prefer M types, but you need it to have a low delta V, and also you need to minimize the travel time. Orbits are fun. It it could be that you don't need a big change in Delta V.

You don't need a change of velocity Uh, that it's relatively cheap to get there fuel wise, but it could take you like 10 years because you need to follow this really lazy lame orbit around the sun to get to it. So it's a very, very complex thing. I mean, this kind of thing happens on regular pro prospecting here on the surface of the earth. Some deposits are very easy to get to, and some are harder and you need to optimize. How expensive is it to get to the various deposits so there might be a huge deposit of gold, but it's at the top of a mountain, and it's guarded by a dragon. I don't know. And and there may be some pebbles here in the river that can just scoop up. Yeah, I don't get as much money, but I can literally just bend over and grab it. People have done studies on asteroid potential targets. There are around a dozen known good asteroids near Earth asteroids that are M type that have pretty favorable Delta V requirements and pretty favorable minimal travel time requirements.

And these people have put together a list of of good prospects and there's about a dozen of them. But you know, SpaceX, the private space company. They're doing this whole reusable rocket thing. They're making access to space a whole lot cheaper. Potentially. Uh, if they continue to bring their costs down, that list can expand to about 100. OK, so we've got somewhere between I don't know, 10 and 100 potential mining targets for asteroids, which is taking a lot of work, and there might be more and better prospects out there, but we don't have the dedicated observing time and telescopes to to find them. So this is what we got. So let's say you design your mission, you blast off from the surface of the earth. You get over to the asteroid. You got it you got. Now you're here. Challenge number three. You got mine. The sucker. Um, mining's not easy. It requires a lot of very expensive, very tough, very sturdy, dependable hard gear. You need to bring all that gear with you. You need the energy to run the refineries in the machinery.

Like are is it gonna be solar power? You know, solar power is great, but we're not running solar power mining rigs here on the surface of the earth. You know, those mining trucks and the diggers and the, you know, whatever they use for mining, those are kind of power hungry. They Right now they run on like diesel. So if you want the that gear to run on the surface of an asteroid, you need to bring the diesel with you. Or do you need to figure out a solar solution? Oh, and there's the thing that you you actually need to figure out how to mine and refine in zero gravity, like here on the earth. Like if you drill into a mountain, you can rely on the fact that gravity is gonna keep everything together. But if I'm on the surface of an asteroid and I push into the asteroid with a drill, well, the asteroid's gonna push back on me, and then my whole mining rig is just gonna, like float away because that's out zero gravity. And and these things are like 100 ft across, like you can jump off of them and reach escape velocity. So you have to attach your mining gear to the asteroid as you go.

When you dig, you have to account for if you got a big back ho, that's like like digs down in. Well, the back is just gonna lift off of the asteroid, so you need to anchor it down in the whole refining process. You know, here on the earth, it's not like there's big slabs of zinc just hanging out. No, it's mixed in with a whole bunch of other rock, and you have to heat up all the rocks and so you can get the zinc out or you can get the gold out. This process called refining a lot of our methods for refining. If not all of them depend on the existence of gravity to pull elements heavier elements away from lighter elements so you can get it what you want. We don't know if we're finding works in zero G or we'd have to develop it, but like like giant centrifuges to separate. But that it's that two costs money that two takes energy. So this isn't like sending the Apollo missions where we send. You know, a couple of dudes in a golf cart. We need to send all the gear and all the fuel to run the gear, and it needs to be brand new gear that we simply don't have.

Right now. Mining an asteroid will probably need to be fully automated, and we don't even have fully automated mining rigs on the Earth, because if it's supervised by humans, if you send someone over there a bunch of miners to work on this and run the machines and fix them and and and find good locations and and troubleshoot all the little issues that always come up in any sort of complex operation, then you need to supply them. We can't even get humans past the moon, and we haven't even gotten humans past low earth orbit in half a century. Now we gotta send them to an asteroid, which is even harder than trying to have it be fully automated. It's not impossible. I'm not here sitting here saying, like mining an asteroid is impossible. It's just way harder than I think A lot of people give it credit for, like mining on the earth is very, very difficult. Now. You want to do it in zero G, 100 million miles away, where you have to take everything with you, including the air. But let's say you do it. Let's say you've solved that challenge.

You you dug up all the zinc out of 16 psyche. Now what? Well, now you gotta bring the stuff back and you've got two choices. Either you do the processing at the asteroid with a big refinery, which is not easy, and you need fuel and energy sources to run those refineries, and you need to figure out how to do it in zero G. But then you send the refined product back like OK, here's your pure iron. Here's your pure nickel. Here's your pure zinc. Here's your pure gold, Um, or you just like send big chunks of rock back to the Earth. But that means you have to haul a lot of useless. So we're not. We're not interested in most of the rock of asteroids. We're interested in the metals that we can extract. And on the Earth, this is a pretty simple operation. You dig up a whole bunch of dirt and rocks, you refine it, and then you take what you don't want. You just leave it in a pile like over there. So we either do it at the asteroid, which is gonna take very difficult technology to develop, or we send every all the raw stuff back to Earth and process it on the Earth.

But then how do you move all that stuff? It's not easy, but if it works, you'll be rich. Which is again Why so tantalizing the market value of a asteroid one mile across, like a typical M type asteroid that's about one mile across. If you were to get present day market values of all the metals available in that asteroid, you would have about $20 trillion. Now if you were to actually flood the market with one mile asteroids worth of raw metals Of course the price would plummet. It would not be worth $20 trillion anymore for the same reason that water is not worth $20 trillion because we got a lot of water. But people would use these metals in interesting new ways. It might spur the development of new technologies and new industries. And so the price might rise again. Uh, it it's complicated. It's impossible to say exactly how much money you would make.

This is not Ask an economist, so I don't know the exact answer. I'm sure there have been guesses and models of how it might shake out. I'm sure that all those guesses are wrong. You would get tons of money like that's undeniable, but I don't know if you'd get $20 trillion you would just get a lot. And the costs are, well, astronomical. You need to run the dedicated observatories to prospect for good asteroids. You need lots of rocket launches to get your gear up there, your mining equipment. You need to develop the new technologies to mine in zero G to to hold onto the asteroid while you dig, you need to develop zero G refining. You need to transport all that stuff and all that fuel all the energy requirements over there. You need to return it safely to the Earth. You not need to find a way to bring it back onto the surface of the Earth like all that Delta V to get over to the asteroid and you need to double it to get back.

That's a lot of money. How much will it cost? Nobody has any idea. This is why asteroid mining hasn't really taken off yet because one we don't have the technology to do it. Two, We don't know how expensive it will really be. And three, we don't know how much money we'll really make. And so that makes for bad investment. As an example, The Osiris Rex Mission. This is NASA's mission to the asteroid Bannu. It cost over a billion dollars, and it's a sample retrieve mission. They grabbed two ounces, which is around 60 g of asteroid Bennu, and they're sending it back to the Earth. It cost a billion dollars to bring back two ounces of rock. It cost a billion dollars to bring back two ounces of rock Now. Yes. Osiris Rex was loaded down with lots of science gear. Lots of miss it, like so some of that cost. If you're not interested in science and you just want to grab pieces of rock to bring back to the earth, it pre presumably it could be cheaper. But let's say it was cut in half $500 million to bring back two ounces of rock.

It still doesn't sound any better than before, But like I said, it's not impossible. These are questions of engineering, not physics. Which means that the solutions are not my department. And if you can figure them out, you'll be super rich. Maybe maybe asteroid mining isn't really viable for Earth based industries. Maybe it's most viable for space industry. I had in my notes here to say the word space industry with with a big voice. So that's what I did. The thinking is Look, we're gonna spend a ton of money, we're gonna develop a bunch of radical new technologies. We're gonna go to these aces and we're gonna dig them up. We're gonna get that iron. We're gonna get that nickel. We're gonna get that zinc. We're gonna get that copper we're gonna dig it all up. Sending it back to Earth is such a nightmare scenario, because all of our costs just like double or triple or whatever. What if instead of sending them back to Earth, we just dig up the asteroids and just use it in space That eliminates that return trip.

So if I, like, wanna build some spaceships, I can do it in a near earth asteroid with the materials on hand. Like if I look at all the ingredient list to build a rocket? Hey, just about everything I need is right there on the asteroid. So I just set up operation on the asteroid and I make a new rocket and the rockets already there in space. That seems like a potentially smarter move, using asteroids not to enhance industry on the earth, but to help bootstrap industry in space, especially those sea type asters. You know, I've I've focused most of this discussion on the M type, the metal type, because those are the most valuable. But in terms of space industry, we're actually more interested in the sea type, which are very, very common, and we're interested in them because they have lots of water and water is good. If, say, you're a human being and you like to drink water and you can also turn water into rocket fuel, you can use the solar panel and zap it apart into hydrogen and oxygen and then later recombine it inside of a rocket and make yourself go.

So, like sea type asteroids are are good refueling depots. That seems like a more interesting application for all these crazy amounts of resources found in asteroids than trying to bring it back to the Earth. There is one more option, which is to bring the asteroid back to Earth. Check this out instead of sending all the mining gear to an asteroid, trying to dig up and refine the asteroid and then send those products back to Earth or sending all the mining gear to the asteroid, digging it all up, refining it and then using it out there because who knows how long it will take before humanity is at this stage where we need refueling depots on near Earth? Asteroids like, if we're waiting for that I. I feel like we've solved like every other problem when it comes to space travel. But what if we brought the asteroid here. What you could do is go to an asteroid and just attach solar arrays to it in an ion engine.

An ion engine is a very simple thing where you use electricity to take some element, heat it up and shoot it out the back. We've we have ion engine technologies. It's a real thing. Some of our satellites are powered by them. They don't give a lot of like. You can't use an ion drive to launch off the surface of a planet because it takes a really, really long time to build up steam. But they're pretty efficient, and they're pretty cheap. NASA had plans for a long time to do something called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, the A RM. The goal was to send a spacecraft to an asteroid, find a boulder like something like 10 ft across or so grapple onto it and then attach a solar panel in an ion drive, use the electricity from the solar panel to power the ion drive and eventually bring that 10 ft wide boulder back into Earth orbit where we could just poke at it.

NASA canceled it because reasons, but if you're interested in asteroid mining. This is my advice to you. Don't try to send all the refining gear and mining gear out there. Bring the asteroid home, bring it into Earth orbit. It'll be a way easier to deal with. Try not to crash it into the earth itself. That seems like a bad idea. But if you can get it into near Earth orbit, then you can. You can do whatever you want with it. You can take your time digging it up. And as an added bonus, if you have developed the technology to redirect asteroids and bring them to the to near the Earth, you have also developed the technology to protect our planet from potentially hazardous asteroids, which seems like a nice side effect. And if you can do it, you'll be super rich, thanks to Avril M on email, Campbell D on the website. Dustin Pee on Facebook, Matthew A on email at Danny Coup on Twitter at Stephen P on email and JE to S on Twitter for the questions that led to today's episode.

Thank you so much to my top patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. It takes all of your contributions to keep the show going. I truly do appreciate it. But big shout outs to Matthew K, Justin Z, Justin G, Kevin Duncan, M Cordy, Barbara K, Neuter Dude, Robert M, Nate H and or F Chris L, Cameron L, NAIA Aarones, Tom B, Scott M, Rob H and Lowell T for your contributions. I really do appreciate it. Keep sending me those questions hashtag ask a spaceman. Ask the spaceman at gmail dot com or the website. Ask apace man dot com. Go leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. It really does help the show and and keep on prospecting. I'll see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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