Topic outline

  • Why mine asteroids?

    Why mine asteroids
    Asteroid mining is a very interesting and important topic. It has been said that it will add trillions to the economy. It has the potential to reduce the price of critical metals including platinum and cobalt, handle resource depletion, move environmentally harmful mining off the planet, and help humanity explore and colonize the solar system. It promises to be one of the most influential sectors of the economy and of space exploration. Asteroid mining represents a potentially large fraction of future human space activity and of our economy. Yet knowledge about asteroids is minimal. These cyber library entries are chosen to allow you to improve your knowledge about asteroids and current plans to utilize their resources.

    Source: http://theweek.com/articles/462830/how-asteroid-mining-could-add-trillions-world-economy



  • How asteroids could be mined

    There are currently three proposed ways to mine asteroids. One is to send out a “robot prospector” to remove precious materials from asteroids and take the resources to their destinations (likely other developments in the solar system or Earth) via capsules. Another is to send a probe to bag a small asteroid and bring it to lunar or Earth orbit (most plans involve lunar orbit to avoid the immense risk of accidentally hitting the Earth with an asteroid), extract resources there, and send out capsules like the previous plan. Finally, a probe might bag an asteroid and then use reflected solar radiation to cause pockets of volatiles to evaporate and be captured in the bag before being transported to the home location via capsules, like the other plans. This has been termed “Optical mining”. 
  • Current companies developing asteroid mining technlogies

    While asteroid mining may seem to be something indefinitely far in the future, a few companies are working today to make it possible in hopes of getting in on the ground floor of this future multi-trillion dollar industry.  Below is information and links to these companies' webpages. The two main ones today that are specifically focused on asteroid mining are Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. Other companies, including Boeing or SpaceX are not doing much work directly related to asteroid mining, but are working on individual technologies that could be utilized later for asteroid mining. Also many space agencies and companies are engaged in assisting future asteroid mining including NASA, ESA,and the government of Luxembourg
    • DSI is one of the major companies making progress toward asteroid mining.  They are volunteering with Enterprise In Space to curate this Center for Excellence, and working with EIS to do conceptual design of systems that might be used aboard the NSS Enterprise spacecraft. 

      The four phases of DSI's plan, from their website, are as follows: 

      Prospecting

      Using tiny scouts to locate and evaluate space resources.

      Deep Space Industries will soon launch its first prospecting missions, using advanced, small spacecraft — like Prospector-1™ — to explore and study Near Earth Asteroids. These prospecting spacecraft will be fitted with sophisticated scientific equipment to help them find water, metals, silicates, and more. 

      Harvesting:

      Using robotic spacecraft to extract and transport resources.

      After prospecting missions have identified the best locations for mining, Deep Space Industries will send specialized robotic spacecraft to begin harvesting resources such as water. Using the company’s next generation Comet water thruster, water extracted from the target asteroid can also be used as propellant for the return trip.

      Processing:

      Separating resources into usable materials.

      Once asteroid materials are returned to near-Earth space, they can then be processed into fuel, drinking water, and building supplies. Harvesting spacecraft will unload their cargo to a processing complex that begins the detailed separation and evolution of materials, getting them ready for manufacturing.  

      Additive manufacturing in micro-gravity.

      Manufacturing in micro-gravity and hard vacuum offers both opportunities and challenges. The upside of making things in space includes the ability to create very large structures that would never fit into the confines of a launch vehicle’s payload fairing. Huge solar arrays to produce energy and enormous antenna to enhance communications satellites are among the possibilities.

      DSI is not only interested in space mining, but in providing improved flight hardware for satellites, including its own. DSI has developed a new thruster that uses water as a propellant called the Comet.  DSI says, "It is intrinsically inert, launch safe, and cost-effective. This low-power, low-profile, high total impulse micro-propulsion system is CubeSat-compatible but incorporates a highly-flexible interface suitable for a wide range of spacecraft sizes. If successful, this has the potential to be very useful as DSI plans to mine water from asteroids, thus ensuring a quick, cheap, and effective fuel source."


      Optical Navigation
      A two-camera optical navigation system enables proximity operations at asteroids or at close range to other targets. This vision system is developed jointly between Deep Space Industries and University of Luxembourg’s* Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT).

      Deep Space Avionics
      Modular, scalable, and intrinsically radiation-tolerant avionics combine the best of commercial technologies with rigorous screening and innovative design approaches to enable cost-effective, yet radiation-robust subsystems for deep space.

      -Source http://deepspaceindustries.com



  • Planetary Resources

    PLANETARY RESOURCES (PR)

    The following information is paraphrased from Planetary Resources' website, explaining how their spacecraft designs propose to solve many of the problems of sending vehicles to intercept near earth asteroids:  

    ATTITUDE DETERMINATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS (ADCS)

    Planetary Resources (PR) has built a new suite of sensors and actuators for their vehicles.  These systems can measure a spacecraft rotating at a rate slower than the hour hand of a clock while pointing a beam within the width of a dime one mile away. By controlling the design of both the components and the system, they aim to balance capabilities and risks where they are appropriately taken rather than depend on historical vendor decisions. 

    Traditional spacecraft control systems are designed to meet the pointing requirements for a single vehicle with specific mission goals. This narrow scope produces an architecture that is unique and rigid, driving up development costs and effort for the attitude control system of each new vehicle. Planetary Resources is developing a spacecraft control architecture that is both modular and upgradeable.  This investment supports the rapid deployment and evolution of PR spacecraft as internal and external demands change.

    Controlling spacecraft attitude is inherently a system level function. Thus, PR has moved away from a traditional, centralized approach in which a single compute element is responsible for the ADCS system and have instead adopted the idea of basic, instinctual behaviors. Instincts are a way of commanding and protecting critical spacecraft components locally, using an integrated and distributed network of low-level hardened compute elements. Similar to a person instinctively removing their hand from a hot surface, the ADCS system has built-in instinctual responses that react to protect the system without relying on the central brain.

    LOW COST AVIONICS & SOFTWARE

    Interplanetary space is a challenging environment for spacecraft avionics. Not only can the thermal, vacuum, and radiation environments damage electronics, the sheer distance from Earth drives designers to take conservative approaches to new technology adoption.  Solutions today often rely on redundant architectures using expensive, centralized, heritage components specifically designed for operations in deep space. This philosophy limits the design team’s ability to benefit from the tremendous advancements in the microelectronics industry, leaving them consistently behind the technological curve. The Mars Curiosity rover, for instance, is controlled by a redundant system that uses a CPU originally developed almost two decades ago.

    PR is breaking away from this model. Instead of an architecture that relies on a single, centralized and expensive set of avionics hardware, PR takes a tiered and modular approach to spacecraft avionics. In its model, a distributed set of commercially-available, low-level hardened elements each handle local control of a specific spacecraft function. According to PR, this dis-aggregation of functional responsibility allows for a number of advantages:

    • It is easier to accommodate modern components and COTS hardware because a single component or sub-system can be replaced without perturbing the rest of the design.
    • PR can rapidly iterate on spacecraft design because the exact form and configuration of the system can be modified late in a design flow.
    • PR can reduce system inter-dependencies as each component has its own independent compute element that coordinates with other parts of the system.
    • PR can decouple hardware and software through virtualization so that each may advance at their own pace.
    Even with this change in architecture, the radiation environment of space is still challenging. Instead of making their system completely “hardened”, PR makes their systems resilient to the effects of radiation by designing the system to allow normal operations to continue despite random reset events on various elements of the architecture.  A modular de-centralized hardware approach allows for a fault to be contained locally at only the component affected.  The ramifications of such an event do not propagate through power, data, and functional interfaces to the rest of the system.

    SPACE COMMUNICATIONS

    “Talking” is a difficult task for any intrepid robotic explorer on its way to near Earth asteroids (NEA), as the distance back to Earth can exceed 2 Astronomical Units (AUs), or nearly 200 million miles. Traditional spacecraft use radio frequency, or RF, communications to solve this problem. While proven and reliable, RF systems require massive and power-intensive hardware that drive the cost of deep-space probes outside of the constraints of commercial budgets. At the same time, very large, sensitive receivers on Earth are necessary to pick up the incredibly faint signals from the spacecraft. NASA’s Deep Space Network, which includes some of the largest radio telescopes on Earth (as large as 70 meters in diameter), was specifically designed to communicate with interplanetary probes in this way. And it does so every day, providing critical communications for dozens of US government and international spacecraft around the solar system. Unfortunately, this makes for a pretty busy interplanetary network, one that is difficult to rely on for commercial operations in deep space.

    PR has found a solution to this problem in the form of optical communications. Due to the shorter wavelength of optical communications when compared to RF, lasers allow for information to be communicated through a more tightly controlled beam using a significantly smaller aperture. This narrower focus greatly reduces the power required for a given communications data rate and distance, allowing a small spacecraft to effectively relay scientific and technical data, even when it is on the other side of the Solar System.

    PR is developing a multi-function main instrument for its Arkyd spacecraft platform, one that integrates remote imaging, optical navigation, and optical communications into a single, resource-efficient tool. The system will take advantage of many of the advancements made in free space optical communications here on Earth, as well as previous work performed for NASA, with MIT as a partner, on miniaturized stabilization for optical communications on nano-satellites.

    HIGH ΔV SMALL SATELLITE PROPULSION SYSTEMS

    Sending a spacecraft into deep space is an energetically expensive proposition.  Conventionally, a spacecraft headed out into the Solar System would be placed directly on its outbound trajectory by its own launch vehicle. This launch vehicle alone can be a $100 Million proposition, or more.  PR is taking a different path. Its Arkyd prospecting spacecraft are small enough to hitch a ride into space with larger, primary payloads.  PR plans to launch one at a time into an orbit based on the needs of the rocket’s primary payload. This presents a challenge, as a rendezvous with a solar-orbiting asteroid requires departing Earth at a very specific time, at a specific speed, and in a very specific direction. Otherwise, you could miss your rendezvous by thousands, or even millions, of kilometers.

    PR solves this problem by being able to make its own way to near Earth asteroids directly from the low Earth orbit where it is placed as a secondary payload. Once in orbit, the Arkyd spacecraft uses its onboard propulsion system and an advantage of the Earth’s gravitational influence called the Oberth effect to escape Earth’s gravity well and head towards a future rendezvous with the NEA of interest.

    The Arkyd spacecraft also employs two key technologies to enable this scale of propulsive capability on such a small platform. First, the system uses one of a new family of green, non-toxic mono-propellants. This allows the spacecraft, as a secondary payload, to be successfully integrated for launch without significant schedule impact or safety risk to the rocket’s primary satellite customer. Second, this propellant is stored and managed within a propulsion system that is directly integrated into the spacecraft’s primary structure. Working with its strategic investor and partner 3D Systems, PR is using additive manufacturing techniques to directly integrate the system’s manifold, plenum, and routing geometries directly into structural elements that support the spacecraft’s elements during the rigors of launch. By doing so, a system that conventionally consists of hundreds of parts and countless workmanship-sensitive assembly operations is now simplified down to just a handful of components, resulting in a system that is at once lighter, cheaper, safer, and much easier to build again and again.

  • Luxembourg

    Luxembourg has heavily invested in Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources and both firms have headquarters there. Luxembourg has a history of successful space investment starting with the satellite boom, where we went from having very few satellites into having many satellites. This allows us to have the 3-G and other useful communication services and greatly enriching the tiny state of Luxembourg. Luxembourg has also changed the laws in their country to provide a clear legal framework for space mining companies to be able to legally keep their profits, which is unlike any other country. This law, the subsides, and the investment by the state are why the two current serious players are partially based in the Duchy of Luxembourg and gives them the competitive advantage to control a slice of this potential trillion dollar industry

    http://www.spaceresources.public.lu/en.html#

    https://www.wired.com/2017/01/luxembourg-setting-silicon-valley-space-mining/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidschrieberg1/2017/01/24/asteroid-mining-the-next-grand-venture-of-tiny-luxembourg/#21cad4d0375a


  • United Nations

    UN declared June 30 "Asteroid Day" to raise awareness, primarily about the destructive potential to asteroids but some about potential human activity such as mining.  Also, they have a space program in development, so that might be involved in the future, but at present they have not released any information related to it

  • ESA

    ESA ,like NASA also has an interest in space mining. It’s interest is more observational than NASA’s interest. ESA is planning on launching the Asteroid Impact Mission, which will be  a microsatellite sized probe sent to an asteroid. While ESA is a young space agency compared to NASA or Roscosmos, it is still capable of sending impressive missions such as the Rosetta mission which helped us learn about comets and asteroids.


    http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Asteroid_day/Every_day_is_Asteroid_Day_at_ESA


    http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Asteroid_Impact_Mission


    http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/06/AIM_at_Didymos



  • NASA

    NASA is interested in asteroids and, in 2007, they sent the DAWN probe to study asteroids in hopes of learning more about the early solar system. NASA has also planned a mission to Psyche, the largest known metallic asteroid in the solar system, and has proposed the Asteroid Redirect Mission. NASA is working on "optical mining", which would work by bagging an asteroid, attaching a large array of mirrors to concentrate the sun's power, and cutting holes in the asteroid. This would release volatiles which would be caught by the bag and frozen by the extreme cold of space for transport and use. 

    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/nasas-asteroid-kick/512342/

    https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II/Sustainable_Human_Exploration

    https://www.geek.com/news/optical-mining-would-drain-asteroids-of-its-resources-help-fuel-deep-space-exploration-1634708/

  • Luxembourg

    Luxembourg has invested in Deep space Industries and Planetary Resources and both firms have headquarters there. Luxembourg has a history of successful space investment starting with the satellite boom, when they increased their satellite inventory substantially, allowing them to have 3G and  other useful communication services. Luxembourg has also changed the laws in their country to provide a clear legal framework for space mining companies to be able to legally keep their profits. 

    http://www.spaceresources.public.lu/en.html#

    https://www.wired.com/2017/01/luxembourg-setting-silicon-valley-space-mining/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidschrieberg1/2017/01/24/asteroid-mining-the-next-grand-venture-of-tiny-luxembourg/#21cad4d0375a

    • Kepler Energy & Space Engineering:

      This is another company interested in building hardware for asteroid mining:
      http://www.kesellc.com/