These are the asteroids you should mine

A new generation of rockets aims to unlock new business models in space, including the science fiction dream of extracting resources from asteroids.

Researchers are taking a closer look at asteroids to determine which of these objects could be a target for future mining missions. A team from the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences spent more than a decade analyzing samples of carbon-rich asteroids, the most common type of space rocks found in the solar system, to understand what might be out there.

THE researchpublished in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, distinguishes a type of asteroid which would constitute a prime target.

“This sounds like science fiction, but it also looked like science fiction when the first sample return missions were planned thirty years ago,” Pau Grèbol Tomás, a graduate student at the Institute of Space Sciences and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. statement.

On the road to space mines

Asteroid mining remains uncharted territory. NASA’s asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, has proven that we can extract material from a space rock and bring it back to Earth. However, achieving this at scale would require advanced propulsion systems, on-orbit refining, and large-scale re-entry technologies, much of which has not yet been demonstrated.

Several space startups have their eyes on the prize and are working to develop these systems that would make asteroid mining a reality. AstroForge, a Californian start-up launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine material from orbiting asteroids. Unfortunately, the company lost contact with its spacecraft.

But such efforts will only persist if there is reason to believe that mining these asteroids will be a lucrative proposition.

Prospects for prospectors

“Most asteroids have relatively low abundances of valuable elements, and so the goal of our study was to understand how viable their extraction would be,” Tomás said.

The researchers characterized 28 meteorite samples and performed detailed chemical analysis using mass spectrometry. In doing so, they determined the chemical composition of six of the most common types of carbonaceous chondrites: meteorites rich in carbon, water and organic compounds.

“The scientific interest in each of these meteorites is that they sample small, undifferentiated asteroids and provide valuable information about the chemical composition and evolutionary history of the bodies from which they came,” Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, an astrophysicist at the Space Sciences Institute and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Based on their analysis, the team discovered that a type of asteroid rich in the minerals olivine and spinel could be an ideal target for future mining missions, as these minerals are associated with the presence of iron, nickel, gold, platinum and so-called rare earth elements.