A gold rush lasting from 1896 to 1899 which sent around 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon, gave us the word ‘Klondike’ to describe a sudden massive wealth-generating opportunity.
While it is doubtful we will see the same number of prospectors, the metal wealth of two nearby asteroids – with more iron, nickel and cobalt than the entire Earth’s metal reserves – is going to spark a new interest in mining space minerals.
According to CNET, the wealth of just one of these two metallic asteroids may contain precious metals worth around $11.65 trillion – that is 11,65 and then followed by 10 zeros.
A new report in The Planetary Science Journal (Physical Characterization of Metal-rich Near-Earth Asteroids 6178 and 2016 ED85) is the basis for CNET’s article and describes how the researchers’ calculations were done.
According to the report, the idea of asteroid mining is not new; Gaffey & McCord (1977) discussed the benefits of mining extra-terrestrial resources, not only for the potential economic value but also as a way of reducing the environmental damage on Earth.
They considered the scenario of mining a small asteroid containing one cubic kilometre of Ni-Fe metals and estimated that for a delivery rate of 50,000 metric tons of nickel per day, the annual return at that time would have been $100 billion. Kargel (1994, 1996) argued that because of the abundance and low prices of Fe and Ni, their exploitation for use on Earth would not be required in the short term, although he pointed out that they could be used in space construction.
Instead, he considered exploiting precious metals such as Au and the platinum group metals (PGMs), which include Ru, Rh, Pd, Os, Ir, and Pt. Kargel (1996) evaluated three mining scenarios, one of them involving the exploitation of a 2.6 km metallic NEA in the 90th percentile of Pt richness.
Due to their high metal content and close flybys to Earth, objects like 1986 DA and perhaps 2016 ED85 could be possible targets for asteroid mining in the future. In this section we provide an estimate of the amount of metals that 1986 DA could contain and how much they could be worth.
