Related papers: Exploring Potential Environmental Benefits of Aste…
Asteroid mining has been proposed as an approach to complement Earth-based supplies of rare earth metals and supplying resources in space, such as water. However, existing studies on the economic viability of asteroid mining have remained…
Asteroid mining can become an enabling technology to establish a sustainable manned colony on Mars, which requires metallic materials more often than they are readily available in shipments from Earth. This paper describes a feasibility…
Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply of resources vital for human civilization. Preliminary analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining…
Today there are numerous studies on asteroid mining. They elaborate on selecting the right objects, prospecting missions, potential asteroid redirection, and the mining process itself. For economic reasons, most studies focus on mining…
[Abridged] Asteroid mining is not necessarily a distant prospect. Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have recently rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroids and will return samples to Earth. While there is significant science motivation for these…
A significant opportunity for synergy between pure research and asteroid resource research exists. We provide an overview of the state of the art in asteroid resource utilization, and highlight where we can accelerate the closing of…
Kick-starting the space economy requires identification of critical resources that can lower the cost of space transport, sustain logistic bases and communication relay networks between major nodes in the network. One important challenge…
This study explores the intersection of technological innovation and environmental sustainability in the context of Bitcoin mining. With Bitcoin's growing adoption, concerns surrounding the energy consumption and environmental impact of…
The national space programs have an historic opportunity to help solve the global-scale economic and environmental problems of Earth while becoming more effective at science through the use of space resources. Space programs will be more…
We face unprecedented resource stresses in the 21st Century such as global climate disruptions, freshwater scarcity, expanding energy demands, and the threat of global pandemics. Historically, societies have relieved resource stress by…
We modify the probabilistic formalism developed by Elvis (2014) to estimate the number of lunar craters that contain ore-bearing asteroid remnants. When we consider craters at or above a threshold diameter of 1 km, we estimate an upper…
The Earth contains between one and ten oceans of water, including water within the mantle, where one ocean is the mass of water on the Earth's surface today. With $n$-body simulations we consider how much water could have been delivered…
Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are thought to contain a wealth of resources, including water, iron, titanium, nickel, platinum and silicates. Future space missions that can exploit these resources by performing In-Situ Resource Utilization…
There is growing interest in the possibility that the resource base of the Solar System might in future be used to supplement the economic resources of our own planet. As the Earth's closest celestial neighbour, the Moon is sure to feature…
In the future situation, aiming to seek more resources, human beings decided to march towards the mysterious and bright starry sky, which opened the era of great interstellar exploration. According to the Outer Space Treaty, any exploration…
Beyond space exploration, the next critical step towards living and working in space requires developing a space economy. One important challenge with this space-economy is ensuring the low-cost transport of raw materials from one…
As human activities on the Moon expand through initiatives like NASA's Artemis program, the need for sustainable post-mission disposal strategies becomes critical to maintaining the lunar environment. This paper analyzes the logistics and…
A simple formalism is presented to assess how many asteroids contain ore, i.e. commercially profitable material, and not merely a high concentration of a resource. I apply this formalism to two resource cases: platinum group metals (PGMs)…
Surface charging phenomenon of asteroids, mainly resulting from solar wind plasma and solar radiation, has been studied extensively. However, the influence of asteroid's rotation on surface charging has yet to be fully understood. Here…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…