What is hidden in the dark side of the moon, many space lovers have been wondering for years.
Our space project involves collecting photos of the hidden side of the moon by sending probes.
Asteroids could pay for so much space exploration.
We just need to mine those valuable resources.
Precious metals are obvious. Platinum sells for about $33.5 million a ton, and we know from meteorites that some asteroids are richer in platinum than any mine on Earth. That sounds promising. Platinum sales run at about 200 tons, or billions of dollars, per year. The bad news is that ‘richer than any mine on Earth’ is still concentrations of just tens of grams per ton, and extracting those precious grams isn’t easy. We can’t just bring an asteroid near to Earth to start extracting the platinum where we can have heavy machinery to work on it. That would take way too much fuel because, to carry more mass, rockets have to carry exponentially more fuel; unlike airplanes, they don’t get the oxygen for free from their surroundings, they have to pull it along with them. Any refining of platinum will have to be done robotically out in the native orbit of the asteroid. That’s quite a challenge.