A private company aims to raise a spatial vehicle in size microwave towards an asteroid at the end of this week, its goal of starting a future in which precious metals are extracted around the sun system to create great fortunes on Earth .
“If this works, this will probably be the largest activity ever conceived,” said Matt Gialich, founder and CEO of AstroForge, the manufacturer and operator of the robotic probe.
It may seem familiar: a decade ago, the news was short on the wealth promised by the mining companies of the asteroids. But things didn’t work.
“We blossomed three or four too early for the great gold race of the enthusiasm of investors for spatial projects,” said David Gump, former CEO of Deep Space Industries, one of the previous lots of aspiring asteroid miners. In the end the money was dried up; Deep Space Industries was sold in 2019 and never reached an asteroid.
The astroforzo is betting that things are different this time. California Company has already launched a demonstration space vehicle in the terrestrial orbit and has collected $ 55 million in funding. Now the company is destined to travel to an asteroid near the earth in deep space.
The second robotic space vehicle of AstroForge, called Odin, is grouped in a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket that will also launch a Lander Moon under a private construction and a lunar orbit made by NASA as soon as Wednesday by Florida. About 45 minutes after the launch, Odin will separate and will begin his journey as a soloist in the deep space, while the Moon missions – the Lander Athena from intuitive machines and Lunar Trailblazer of NASA – take off in their separate journeys.
No commercial company has ever launched an operational mission beyond the Moon and AstroForge is the first company to receive a license from the Federal Communications Commission which allows it to transmit from deep space. The astroforzo will communicate with the space vehicle using dishes not disclosed in India, South Africa, Australia and the United States.
Initially, AstroForge has maintained his asteroid target a secret, fearing competitors. But in January, the company announced the destination, an object called 2022 OB5. Mr. Gialich said he was safer than AstroForge’s advantage.
“We are the only one who is actually doing anything,” he said. “Who else is preparing to go to an asteroid?”
Asteroid 2022 OB5 is small, no more than 330 feet, about the size of a football field. The Scientific Team of AstroForge evaluated the asteroid using telescopes, including Lowell’s observatory and the large binocular telescope in Arizona, to estimate its metal content. They believe that 2022 OB5 is an M type, an asteroid class that includes 5 % of the notes that can be known that can have a high amount of metal. Asteroid analysis has not yet been published.
Stephanie Jarmak, a planetary scientist of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center, said that the company’s analysis was plausible.
“There are several ways to determine if it is a type m or not,” he said, including the study of the brightness of the asteroid or albedo. A higher brightness suggests the presence of multiple metal. He praised the company for being more open on his asteroid target. “I thought it was really nice,” he said.
It is believed that the M asteroids are rich in metals such as iron and nickel. These could be useful as a resource for construction in space, perhaps to build new space vehicles and machinery. However, some M types can also be rich in more precious platinum metals, or PGM, used in devices such as smartphones. The god would be enormous if these could be extracted in abundance and brought to earth.
“A single asteroid of a kilometer diameter, if it was brought according to the platinum, would contain about 117,000 tons of platinum,” said Mitch Hunter-Scullion, founder and managing director of the Asteroid Mining Corporation in Great Britain. His company is adopting a slower approach and plans to demonstrate technologies on the moon later in this decade.
“It is about 680 years of global offer. You are talking about centuries of platinum demand from a single asteroid, “said Hunter-Scullion.” Even if you get 1,000 tons of platinum, you are sitting there with the next half a century of cell phones. “
Not everyone is convinced that so many precious metals are found within type M. asteroids.
“There are not enough PGMs in asteroids to justify it as autonomous activity,” said Joel C. Sercel, founder and CEO of Transastra, a company that is developing a giant bag that could be used to grab and extract resources from asteroids in the future . The company will tester a small model of technology on board the International Space Station following a station launch this summer.
The legality of mining asteroids and the sale of their resources remain uncertain.
In 2015, President Obama signed a law that allows you to sell asteroid resources on Earth. But nobody has tested this law yet.
“Will AstroForge make a complaint? The fact that they reach this asteroid before someone else means that no one else can go to it? “Asked Michelle Hanlon, a law teacher specialized in space at the Mississippi University.” It will be interesting to see the international reaction. “
Odin will arrive at the end of 2025 after a trip of about 300 days to 2022 OB5. The asteroid follows an orbit around the sun similar to that of the earth. The probe will fly beyond the asteroid at a distance of 0.6 miles, using two black and white cameras to take photos. Zoom for the object thousands of miles per hour, the space vehicle will have a meeting that will last five and a half hours.
“And it is probably only the last 10 minutes that we are getting larger photos than a pixel,” said Gialich.
The goal is that these images are sufficient to say if the asteroid is metallic.
“I hope it looks shiny,” said Gialich. However, it is very likely that any metal can be mixed in the asteroid soil and not be visible.
“I’m not sure how much compositional information can get purely from the images,” said dr. Jarmak, planetary scientist.
The craters on the surface can suggest the hidden metal, said Gialich, adding: “We expect to see cracking on the surface” which could be indicative of metal content.
The spaceship will also draw exactly the position of the asteroid in space during the Flyby. In this way it could allow the calculation of the asteroid density, based on its gravitational shot on the space vehicle. A higher density would suggest a more metallic content.
Success is not guaranteed. The first mission of AstroForge, Brokkr-1, was launched in orbit in low earth in April 2023 to test the company’s planned asteroid refinement technology. But the mission encountered problems and burned in the atmosphere. Gialich said that the astroforzo has improved its technologies on the spatial vehicle of Odin by relying on the components produced internally.
Vestri, the third mission of AstroForge, will be his most ambitious. That spaceship, the size of a refrigerator, will be designed to land on an asteroid as soon as next year, perhaps also 2022 OB5 if the metal content is confirmed. Vestri’s landing legs would be equipped with magnets designed to stick to the surface of the asteroid and be able to estimate how many PGMs are present.
The success of this mission is not clear. “If it is made of solid metal, it will stick,” said Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, many asteroids are known to be the batteries of rubble, essentially collected of rocks held freely by gravity, such as the asteroid Bennu that has been visited by NASA’s Orisis-Rex space vehicle.
“I’m barely kept together,” said dr. Weiss, which means that magnets could end up extracting some rocks from the surface while the Lander walks away.
Only a space vehicle, the Rosetta spatial vehicle of the European Space Agency, has already visited a suspicion of the M type asteroid before, a Flyby of the Asteroid 21 Luthentia in 2010. The presence of metal at that time was inconclusive. A much more capable mission, the 1.2 billion dollar psyche spatial of NASA, is currently traveling to an asteroid with the same name by 2029. Astronomes think that the asteroid can be a fragment of the nucleus of a planet failed and is rich in metal.
The results of the analysis of the 2022 ODD mission of 2022 OB5 could be an attractive toothpick for the psyche. “If it turns out that it is made of solid metal, this would support the idea that some of these larger bodies such as the psyche could be the nuclei of the differentiated bodies,” said dr. Weiss.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton at Arizona State University, the main Psyche investigator and also an AstroForge consultant, said that the opportunities offered by commercial missions of deep spaces such as Odin are exciting, allowing small and quick missions at low cost. “It will be a bit of a turning point,” he said.
Others are more focused on what Odin means for the extraction of the asteroid in this time.
“So far it is probably the highest result in the sector,” said Hunter-Scullion of Asteroid Mining Corporation. Sercel of Transastra also applauded the company.
“We are gung-ho for the astroforzo and we wish them good luck,” he said. “We are behind them 100 percent.”
Now there is only the small question of launch and the journey to the asteroid, and the hope that what Odin will find will lead to the wealth for some time propagated by the extraction of the asteroid.
“If we do it, I’m getting Champagne burst,” said Gialich.