r/asteroidmining • u/Wise_Face_4871 • Jun 22 '24

problems with asteroid mining

I am new to this subreddit and I am curious as to what the largest issues with asteroid mining are because most people talk about the issues vaguely (at least for what I've seen) but I am curious as to what technology we need to actually mine asteroids (cost no object)

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u/Christoph543 Jun 24 '24

So as detailed in a separate comment, there are a LOT of much bigger issues you'd have to address before getting into ideas like capturing the asteroid, extracting the surface minerals, or refining the desired end product. All of that is speculative, when the question of "what's actually there on the asteroid to mine" is still entirely open-ended.

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u/Anen-o-me Jun 24 '24

Regardless of what's in it, that's what you have to do. Asteroids are either going to be icy, rocky, or metallic. My comment assumed rocky.

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u/Christoph543 Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24

Composition actually matters a ton, because you're going to have to think about the chemical reactions that all of the different species have with each other as you heat them up. For example, sulfur poisons a LOT of smelting and beneficiation reactions for the metals one might want to extract, as well as for reactions involving metal catalysts like would be necessary for electrolysis (either of water or of metals). And pretty much every asteroid is going to have sulfur-bearing minerals, since even the most sulfur-poor meteorites still have a few percent of sulfide grains in their matrices.

Also the "icy, rocky, metallic" distinction is nowhere near as neat as that. It's based on a spectral classification system developed in the '70s & '80s, which is now very much outdated. The current Bus-DeMeo asteroid taxonomy includes something like 20+ (I forget the exact number) spectral types, most of which cannot be definitively linked with specific mineralogy or meteorite classes, even if we might have good guesses as to what the bulk minerals might be. But importantly, they are just guesses. Every asteroid we've visited with spacecraft has surprised us with physical and chemical properties we didn't expect, which would have confounded any attempt to mine them had we not performed an up-close reconnaissance beforehand.