As I reported in The BFD late last year, a planned robotic mission to the asteroid Psyche 16 is significant for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it is believed that Psyche 16 is a fragment of a smashed proto-planet: a leftover from the early, violent days of the formation of the Solar System. More particularly, it may be the remains of a nascent planetary core. As such, it represents the chance to study what scientists could otherwise not conceivably access: the core of a rocky planet.
Which brings us to the second point: if Psyche 16 is the exposed core of a rocky planet like the Earth, then it should be rich in metals. Fabulously rich.
The Psyche asteroid is packed full of precious metals and could be worth more than $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion), new measurements of its surface temperature have confirmed.
“Confirmed” is far too strong a word to use. “Strongly suggested” might be better.
Ahead of the NASA mission, the team from California carried out a close examination of the millimeter-wavelength emissions from the asteroid.
This allowed them to produce the first temperature map of the space rock, providing new insight into its surface properties.
Normally, infrared images of a space rock provide a single pixel of data, but using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers were able to get 50 pixel resolution and learn more about the surface of the space rock[…]
The study confirmed that Psyche’s thermal inertia is high compared to that of a typical asteroid, indicating it has an unusually dense or conductive surface.
When de Kleer, Cambioni, and Shepard analysed the data, they also found that Psyche’s thermal emission, that is the amount of heat it radiates, is 60 per cent of what would be expected from a typical surface with thermal inertia.
Because surface emission is affected by the presence of metal on the surface, their finding indicates that Psyche’s surface is no less than 30 per cent metal[…]Psyche 16 is suspected to be made of mostly iron and nickel.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Iron and nickel are fairly common metals but in large quantities they can be worth an awful lot. Just ask Western Australia’s iron ore billionaires.
Psyche 16 is an awful lot of iron and nickel.
Dr Elkins-Tanton has calculated that the iron in 16 Psyche alone, would be worth $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion).
Daily Mail
Unfortunately, that ignores the fundamental principle of economics: scarcity.
Iron is currently worth a lot (in bulk) because, while there is a lot of it, there are even more people wanting it. If the market was flooded, then the price would plummet.
Besides, even if the proposed probe does discover that Psyche 16 is one gigantic ball of metal, that doesn’t mean that it is the dawning of a new Gold Rush (or Iron Rush, as the case may be).
Any commercially viable asteroid-mining industry is a long way away. The probe won’t even determine Psyche’s composition until after the end of the decade. Even after that, there are the logistics to consider: at the moment, mining in space is too prohibitively expensive.
But that’s mainly due to the difficulty – and therefore expense – of getting up and down from Earth’s surface. But commercial space enterprises are slashing the cost of getting into orbit.
Should significant Earth-orbit platforms expand in the near future – think, the ISS, only private enterprise – with space-based refining and manufacturing capability, then asteroid mining may well be the cheaper option. It would cost next-to-nothing to launch “carts” full of asteroid ore and send them coasting back to Earth-orbit (and vice-versa), compared to launching materials refined and built on Earth.
There would still be the problem of getting back down to Earth without burning up on re-entry, but that’s an engineering problem to be solved.
Even assuming we want to get them down to Earth. More likely, space-based refining would be used to mostly produce material for expanding space-based platforms.
It certainly seems premature to start selling off any resources stocks you might own.
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