Nearly a 12 months in the past, the house science neighborhood watched as an asteroid entered Earth’s orbit and circled above our heads for nearly two months earlier than departing. Scientists normally observe such asteroids due to the danger they pose for all times on Earth. However though they’ll pose a menace to our planet, asteroids are additionally doubtlessly price many billions of {dollars} due to the valuable metals they include. Because of this house entrepreneurs and scientists are gearing up for the subsequent asteroid go to, with the purpose of capturing future house rocks and mining them.
Most asteroids orbit the solar inside rings between Mars and Jupiter generally known as the asteroid belts. And importantly, a few of these asteroids are stuffed with metals that may very well be used to make laptops and smartphones; metals comparable to platinum, cobalt, iron, and even gold. NASA as soon as calculated that the metals in these asteroids may very well be price $100 million for each individual on Earth, and mining even simply 10 of probably the most worthwhile asteroids might yield as much as $1.5 trillion.
A significant query stays: Can we entry these metals?
Every now and then, Jupiter’s sturdy gravity sends an asteroid hurtling via the photo voltaic system, generally in direction of Earth. Last year, one of these asteroids entered Earth’s orbit: asteroid 2024 PT5 from the Arjuna asteroid belt that’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun.
2024 PT5 was called a “mini-moon,” though this term was used loosely. A mini-moon is supposed to complete one full orbit of the Earth, but asteroid 2024 PT5 exited Earth’s gravitational pull before it could make a whole trip. Still, the space rock mirrored our true moon’s orbit overhead, earning it the mini-moon moniker — and it was indeed full of rare earth metals.
Can we mine an asteroid?
While asteroid samples have been brought to Earth for research purposes before, such as with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and Japan’s Hayabusa2 missions, the cost of these journeys has fallen between about $10 million and $150 million per gram of fabric, which might bankrupt any firm attempting to show an everyday revenue.
A part of the explanation for this excessive price ticket is most asteroids are normally so distant that mining them isn’t worthwhile. Gas and tools prices alone would add up fairly a bit. Nevertheless, that is the place mini-moons are available; these objects characterize a much more achievable goal for asteroid mining. In any case, they’re proper there above our heads. Actually, final 12 months’s mini-moon sighting prompted many space-mining startups to make plans for extra sudden asteroid visits.
“If we had our techniques up and working, we might go and get it,” Joel Sercel, founder and CEO of TransAstra, an asteroid mining firm, advised Space.com on the time 2024 PT5 was in orbit. “We might fly out to it, seize it, and put it in a really steady orbit with a really small quantity of rocket propellant. Then we’ve a everlasting useful resource in house that we personal.”
There may be one complication, nonetheless: House entrepreneurs and scientific researchers disagree about how widespread mini-moons are, and fewer than 10 have been noticed inside the final decade. What this implies is that whereas there are lots of plans of the way to seize these asteroids and use their metals, nobody has ever pulled it off. What consultants all agree on, although, is that reaching an asteroid basically is pricey and tough.
“Generally they’re actually scorching; generally very chilly,” Mustafa Hassanalian, an affiliate professor on the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Expertise, advised Space.com. “That is one thing that makes it difficult, [along with the] radiation, it makes any missions to asteroids complicated.”
At any given time, there are a couple of dozen small asteroids circling the Earth, however most of them aren’t large enough to make a visit worthwhile — however once more, mini moons are simply the suitable measurement to make mining them possible economically..
The problem lies to find them. However a crew of scientists on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which holds the world’s largest digital digicam, has beforehand stated that advances in asteroid detection will enable for better detection of mini-moons. With the observatory releasing its first pictures in June, house mining appears solely a matter of time.
Who can mine it?
Chinese companies control between 80-90% of rare earth metal exports, which has pushed private companies in the U.S. and elsewhere to look for new sources in unlikely places. Copper — needed for wind turbines, nickel — required for solar panels, and platinum — vital for hydrogen-powered fuel cells — are found in abundance in certain asteroids.
Most rare materials on Earth come from previous asteroid impacts, but the Earth’s gravity has pulled heavier elements into its core over billions of years, leaving us with only a small amount of these metals close enough to the surface for mining.
The first asteroid ‘soft landing’ was unintentional, when NASA touched down NEAR Shoemaker on asteroid Eros in 2001 after it ran out of propellant. However, scientists were surprised the spacecraft survived the landing at all, and the mission shut down two weeks later due to cold temperatures on the asteroid. Since then, multiple nations have made contact with asteroids, with Japan following soon after with Hayabusa which launched in 2003, and Hayabusa2 that lifted off in 2014. NASA reached another asteroid with the aforementioned OSIRIS-REx mission, launching on Sept. 8, 2016 and dropping off its samples on Sept. 24, 2023, becoming the latest space mission to return asteroid samples for testing. China launched Tianwen-2 on May 28, 2025, and it is set to return asteroid samples in 2027.
So, why don’t we have a booming asteroid mining industry already? Well, aside from the cost issues mentioned, asteroids spin very quickly, which makes landing on them and extracting metals difficult. Sercel from TransAstra says that the spacecraft that take back asteroid samples aren’t really “landing” on the asteroids at all. Because asteroids don’t have strong gravity like planets, there’s nothing to keep the shapecraft tethered to the floor. Furthermore, because asteroids don’t have atmospheres like Earth or Mars, they’re vulnerable to the impact of thousands of tiny particles that kick up clouds of dust that would clog up any machinery. On previous mining missions, scientists got around this problem by using a robotic arm to grab pieces of debris earlier than transferring rapidly away, however this tactic works solely on small quantities of fabric.
In consequence, as a substitute of touchdown immediately on the asteroid, house entrepreneurs are methods to reap the valuable metals inside asteroids with out getting so near the objects.
The mining players
Tethers Unlimited, a company born from the mind of science-fiction-author-turned-researcher R. L. Forward and researcher-turned-science-fiction-writer Rob Hoyt, worked with NASA to design a means of catching asteroids instead of landing on them.
The company’s satellites were designed to launch a gigantic net at the asteroid and capture it before towing it into Earth’s gravity, where smaller satellites would chip the metal away and bring it down to the planet more affordably. The net line is angled to stop the asteroid from tumbling and slow it down — the same way an ice skater might extend her leg to reduce spin speed.
But NASA ended funding for Tethers, so the design wasn’t produced in time to capture the mini-moon 2024 PT5. Hassanalian, a researcher at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, takes inspiration from the insect kingdom — with a design that deploys a net in front of an asteroid’s path, capturing it in a spiderweb-like mesh.
Meanwhile, TransAstra’s design also involves catching the asteroid instead of landing on it — but it does so using a more powerful tool than its competitors: the sun.
TransAstra plans to exploit what it calls “concentrated sunlight” to break up a water-rich asteroid. The company would deploy a giant plastic bag — made out of polyamide — to wrap the asteroid in, which Sercel compared to Mylar aluminum wrap or clingfilm, before using what amounts to a sophisticated magnifying glass to melt away the asteroid (which is mostly ice) and leaving the precious metals behind.
The mini moon is the “perfect size” for such a venture, says Sercel, although the mini moon unfortunately arrived before TransAstra was ready to take advantage of the opportunity. The company’s eyes are set on the next celestial visitor, which could arrive anywhere from a year to a decade from now.
“It’s not like you have the opportunity [to mine a mini-moon] every month,” Hoyt, of Tethers Unlimited, told Space.com “You could take a look at parking it in orbit around the Earth, but that would take a lot of propellant. You also need to be very careful you don’t drop it on the Earth.”
In 2029, NASA will launch its most ambitious asteroid-exploration mission to date, sending the Psyche probe to map out a metal-rich asteroid with the same name. It could set the stage for the first interstellar industry. The asteroid 16 Psyche is thought to be worth quadrillions of dollars (that’s 15 zeros), according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the lead scientist on the NASA mission, quoted in Global News.
It may very well be sufficient to crash the worldwide financial system, relying on how rapidly the supplies may very well be transported to Earth. Uncommon earth suppliers additionally face an issue acquainted to the oil and gasoline business: a rise in provide resulting in a drop in costs, which makes extraction of uncooked supplies much less worthwhile.
And it could seem that almost all firms seeking to bag an asteroid aren’t profitable. Tethers needed to shut down after its funding ran out and its co-founder Robert Lull Ahead, an American physicist and writer of 11 novels, handed away.
Hoyt, the remaining founder, can be turning his hand towards writing a science fiction novel, one the place the identical gadgets he labored on for NASA can stay on via creativeness. For now, with out the large quantity of affected person funding wanted to make such companies a actuality, that is the place most asteroid mining expertise will stay.
