Written by: Dhiraj Chapagain - 2022007, Grade X
Posted on: 17 September, 2020
The mining industry is responsible for air and water pollution and also the destruction of the entire landscape. To extract the minerals from the earth, chemicals like cyanide, sulphuric acid, or chlorine are used ultimately causing harm to biodiversity, human resources, and the people. But the solution to all these problems? Space.
Asteroids are millions and trillions of tons of rock, metals, and ice ranging from being small as rock to the size of countries. The majority of asteroids are located in the Asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter while there are many others such as NEOs (Near Earth Objects) that orbit between Mars and Earth crossing the path of our planets and sometimes colliding. There are many valuable space rocks that are incredibly useful for creating technologies and one of them is palladium which is more expensive than gold.
As asteroids don’t have any gravity or enough heat to move those materials into the interiors, we can easily find precious valuable items on the surface than in the earth’s crust. Now space mining has become a business outside of earth as there are now legitimate private space mining companies such as Planetoid Mines which have already started to launch mini-satellites to test out their system. The most valuable known asteroid is estimated to be worth $15 quintillion, according to Asterank, a database owned by Planetary Resources. This space race began when Japan did its first asteroid mining mission Hayabusa which successfully brought back a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis.
As of now, the technology to mine items from asteroids exists but the only thing remaining is to scale-up its capabilities so that it could bring back more stuff to earth creating profit.
