Asteroid mining: not such a crazy idea

When Bellevue-based Planetary Resources, Inc. first went public in April of 2012 with its plans to mine astroids for water and minerals there were many who reacted with an “Oh, pshaw.” Less than three years later, the successful landing by the ESA Rosetta mission of its probe Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, out in the far reaches of the solar system, makes it all seem like a more plausible idea.

“I love seeing the success of this mission because it proves that what we are doing is technically feasible today,” said Caitlin O’Keefe, director of marketing for Planetary Resources, on Tuesday during a Science Café talk sponsored by the Pacific Science Center at The Swiss Pub in Tacoma. O’Keefe added that Philae and Rosetta are ten-year-old craft that have spent a decade traversing six billion kilometers of space. Technology has advanced during that time; think about what your cell phone couldn’t do in 2004.

Caitlin O’Keefe, marketing director for Planetary Resources,
spoke about asteroid mining at a Science Café event Tuesday
 in Tacoma. Photo borrowed from Facebook.

O’Keefe and everyone at Planetary Resources understand the skepticism. She quoted company co-founder Peter Diamandis as saying, “The day before something is a breakthrough it is a crazy idea.”

They’re creating the technology today to get themselves to that breakthrough. Advances in spacecraft control, avionics, communication systems, propulsion, and observation will help them identify and then get to resource-rich asteroids.

Unfortunately, one of their first tests of the technology went up in flames. Their Arkyd 3 satellite, which was to try out some of their new systems, blew up with the Antares rocket back in October.

“This was a bummer for our team to watch,” O’Keefe said. “There was a big hooray when it launched, and some not so nice words when it exploded six seconds later.”

But, she added, they’ve been able to shrug it off, in large part because their philosophy is to build a lot of small and relatively inexpensive spacecraft rather than putting all of their space-bound eggs into one billion-dollar basket.

“This is going to be a very important part of the space industry going forward: the ability to accept failure,” she said.

Many of the questions from the patrons of The Swiss during the talk centered around the financial aspects of mining in space. O’Keefe noted that there is a lot of potential. For example, one target astroid is thought to contain some $500 billion worth of platinum, which if mined would be more than has been extracted from Earth to date. While that could be a big payday, their first target is a more common substance: water. Water is good for drinking and protection from radiation, and can be turned into rocket fuel. And O’Keefe pointed out that it’s a lot cheaper to pick up water in space than it is to take it with you. To launch a bottle of water into low-Earth orbit you need about 50 times its mass in rocket fuel, and that pencils out to about $20,000. The savings add up, and it will make long space missions much more fiscally possible; a spacecraft can go all the way from Earth to Pluto on the same amount of fuel it takes just to launch into low-Earth orbit.

Mining may well be easier in the zero gravity of space, too, and the methods for doing it are pretty straightforward.

“Building this technology will be extremely difficult,” O’Keefe admitted. “I’m not downplaying the difficulty of a complicated system, but the theory of how to extract it is pretty well known.”

O’Keefe invited us all to join the asteroid mining effort. You can go to Asteroid Zoo, a venture launched this summer by Planetary Resources and Zooniverse, to help comb through data and identify potentially resource-rich asteroids.

An Earth Day plea to help spot killer asteroids

Last year’s explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteor in the skies over Russia notwithstanding, most people still think that asteroid impacts on Earth are exceedingly rare events. In fact, over the last 13 years the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has detected 26 explosions of between one and 600 kilotons.

The B612 Foundation, established to give us some early warning of asteroid strikes, used the backdrop of Earth Day to release a new video that graphically depicts the data from these impacts. The video notes that “our current strategy for dealing with asteroid impacts is blind luck.”



“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Ed Lu, CEO and co-founder of the B612 Foundation, at a news conference held at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. “We humans can actually go and change this, and there is nothing stoping us from doing that.”

The foundation is working to launch the Sentinel Mission space telescope to detect possibly one million or more undiscovered asteroids in Earth’s celestial neighborhood. The mission is planned for launch in 2018.

Former astronaut Ed Lu, CEO of the B612 Foundation, spoke at
an Earth Day news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle
about the organization’s plan for detecting Earth-threatening
asteroids. Seated behind Lu are former astronauts Tom Jones, left,
and Bill Anders, who shot the famed “Earthrise” photo behind
them from Apollo 8 at the Moon. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“This is what Earth Day is all about,” Lu said. “It’s looking at the big picture. It’s realizing that sometimes the most important thing isn’t what’s right in front of your face; it’s what you see when you look up.”
Lu said the object of the video isn’t to scare people.

“I think you should be inspired to do something,” he said. “The point of it is to roll up your sleeves and say, ‘Let’s just solve this.'”

Sentinel is based largely on the design of the Kepler Space Telescope. It would be launched into an orbit near that of Venus and would look back at Earth with infrared instruments in order to more readily spot asteroids. Lu said it will be able to spot a charcoal briquet at a distance of nearly 30,000 miles.

Former astronaut Tom Jones, president of the Association of Space Explorers, said his group is working with the UN to build international acceptance and cooperation in the effort. The association hopes to see an asteroid deflection demonstration—a process as easy as ramming a spacecraft into the object—within a decade.

“On Earth Day we focus on understanding and protecting our environment,” Jones noted. “It’s time to use our space skills to change the workings of the solar system and make sure that we protect humanity through our technology in space flight.”

A third former astronaut joined the panel to support the effort. Bill Anders shot the famed “Earthrise” photo from Apollo 8 that is sometimes called the most influential environmental image ever. While fairly new to the B612 family, Anders supports the mission, noting that it’s something NASA isn’t doing right now.

“These civilians have stepped forward and are doing something with their post-space careers that I view as quite significant, and I’m honored to be a small part of it,” Anders said.

It will cost about $250 million to build Sentinel. While Lu avoided giving any exact figures, he said they’re about 15 percent of the way to that in their fundraising. Noting that the cost is barely that of a freeway overpass, he expressed confidence that the foundation will reach that fundraising goal in time to meet their launch schedule.

“This is the only wholesale natural disaster that I know how to prevent, so that’s what I’m going to do,” Lu said.

Avoiding asteroid armageddon

NASA’s chief asteroid hunter says one spectacular comet and two lousy motion pictures are probably the reasons that we are keeping a close watch for asteroids or comets that could potentially smack into Earth and wipe out life on our planet.

“The collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 sensitized the public to impacts in the solar system,” said Don Yeomans, senior research scientist and manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Then there were those two dreadful movies around 1998—’Armageddon’ and ‘Deep Impact.’ They sensitized the public. The public contacted their Congressmen, their Congressmen said, ‘NASA, what the heck are you doing about this problem?’”

Thus were born the agency’s efforts to track near-Earth objects.

Yeomans, author of Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us, spoke last week at Town Hall Seattle. He must know his stuff; after all, he’s got an asteroid—2956 Yeomans—named after him! Yeomans gave an engaging presentation about the history of rocks slamming into our planet, from the football-sized meteorite that wrecked a New York woman’s Chevy Malibu in 1992 to the 10-kilometer asteroid that nailed us 65 million years ago and snuffed the dinosaurs. He noted that asteroids and comets probably delivered the water and carbon-based materials to the early Earth that allowed life to form, but they could potentially destroy life, too.

Yeomans’ job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. He says an army of professional and amateur observers are tracking thousands of near-Earth objects and feeding the data to JPL.

“It’s up to us to compute orbits for all of these objects and run their motions a hundred years into the future to see if any of them make any interesting close-Earth approaches,” Yeomans said. JPL then figures the likelihood of any of these objects actually hitting the Earth.

“If any objects represent a threat we ask for additional observations from the observing community,” Yeomans explained, adding that this helps them pin down an object’s orbit. “As we get more and more data the uncertainties get smaller and smaller and we can run that for a couple of hundred years into the future to see if it is actually going to hit the Earth.”

Yeomans said the probability of something hitting us is not zero.

“There are almost 100 objects on our risk page for which we cannot yet rule out an Earth impact,” he said. “But all of the impact probabilities are very small—one in 10 to the sixth or smaller—so no one should lose sleep over near-Earth objects coming in and taking us by surprise. Still, there are a number of them that we’re keeping an eye on.”

The good news is that there is something we can do about it if we discover an object on a collision course with Earth. In fact, it’s a relatively simple maneuver that we’ve already pulled off: send up a spacecraft and ram it into the thing.

“You could slow it down a millimeter per second and change its orbital period, so in 10 to 20 years when it was predicted to hit the Earth it would miss by a wide margin,” Yeomans said.

His biggest concern is with a comet impact. Comets often aren’t discovered until they reach the orbit of Jupiter. It takes a comet just nine months or so to get from Jupiter to Earth, so if one were headed for us there would be little time to do anything. The good news is that asteroids far outnumber comets, and so a comet impact is a much more remote possibility.

Earlier this month NASA ruled out the chances that the asteroid Apophis will slam into us in 2036, though it will miss Earth by less than 20,000 miles in 2029. Yeomans said they will keep a constant eye out for other near-Earth objects.

“We need to find them before they find us if we are indeed to have a future,” he said.
UPDATE: Speaking of asteroids and Yeomans, Alice’s Astro Info has posted about Asteroid 2012 DA14, which is going to miss us by that much Feb. 15.

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Listen to a recording of Yeomans’ talk on the Town Hall Seattle website.