Science fiction authors and futurists have been musing on the possibility of mining asteroids for decades, but last year a company called Planetary Resources declared its intention to actually do it. That got people thinking about whether or not humanity has really reached the point where asteroid mining could become a reality. A group of astronomers at the University of Strathclyde in the UK have replied with an emphatic positive response. They have identified 12 near-Earth asteroids that could be easily retrieved and mined with current rocket technology.
They conclude that asteroids could contain large deposits of industrial and precious metals. An unremarkable one-kilometer asteroid could contain upwards of two billion tons of iron-nickel ore, which is three times the global yield on Earth. Then there is the likely presence of gold, platinum, and other rare substances. Planetary Resources claims a 30-meter object of the right composition could contain $25 to $50 billion in platinum.
These numbers spurred the University of Strathclyde team, led by Garcia Yarnoz, to pour over the astronomical data on near-Earth objects to see if any of them could actually be snared. To their surprise, they found 12 small asteroids that pass close enough to Earth that they could be corralled into the L1 or L2 Lagrangian points for mining operations. The researchers dubbed these asteroids Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs).
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