New NASA Mission to Help Us Learn How to Mine Asteroids

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 08/13/13

Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean. Asteroids could one day be a vast new source of scarce material if the financial and technological obstacles can be overcome. Asteroids are lumps of metals, rock and dust, sometimes laced with ices and tar, which are the cosmic leftovers from the solar system formation about 4.5 billion years ago.