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Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Asteroid Worth 70k Times the Global Economy
- PaulHoule 6y agoRare metals are nice but I like carbonaceous chondrite asteroids better... the ones that are fikked with gas and coal and have some kind of skin that keeps in the gas.
- jonplackett 6y agoWill definitely play a role in the Forbes richest person in the solar system one day.
- patentatt 6y agoI wonder how much refinement the metals in an asteroid like this might require. Are we’re talking saudi oil, or Canadian oil sands?
- m0llusk 6y agoIt would be great to somehow make use of reentry generated heat to deliver purified ingots upon landing.
- dmarchand90 6y agoI wonder if there's a way you could calculate it's "true" value, which would account for the diminished cost of nickel and iron such an extracted asteroid would surely cause. I'm thinking how aluminum used to be worth more than gold and an estimate from the mid-late 19th century would say that we should all be rich from abundant aluminum.
- scotty79 6y agoYeah. In the future one would say "Of course the legs of my table are made from gold-titanium alloy. It's just the cheapest stuff around. Besides, you couldn't have them this thin and light in any other material and that would balloon transport cost and messed up feng shui. It's just a normal table from Ikea."
- CodeGlitch 6y agoYes. See aluminium. (Was very expensive before we figured out how to manufacture it cheaply)
- duxup 6y agoThat and would be intresting to sort of theorize beyond that "If this isn't rare anymore... where might it be used that it wasn't before?"
- bryanlarsen 6y agoRare materials are valuable because they're rare. If we brought Psyche16 home, they wouldn't be rare, and wouldn't be valuable. Additionally, a lot of the value of Psyche16 is in iron and nickel. Those aren't rare on Earth -- most of the cost of iron and nickel is labour and energy in mining & refining them. Yes, Psyche16 is much more pure than currently accessible Earth ores, but that's more than offset by the fact that it's in outer space.
- scotty79 6y agoIron and nickel are not that attractive. But if you could nab a gold one... I think there'll be a huge market for gold-titanium alloys.
- londons_explore 6y agoIs a gold titanium alloy any good? Few materials become more useful when alloyed with gold...
- adrian_b 6y agoI have never heard of any use for a titanium-gold alloy. On the other hand, titanium-palladium alloys are very useful because they have better corrosion resistance in various chemical media. Palladium can be found in the iron-nickel alloys from meteorites and asteroids in relatively large concentrations, together with the other platinum-group elements.
- scotty79 6y agoIt's a fairly new material but it already has some uses. https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder-steels.html https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder...
- adrian_b 6y agoAccording to that description, that titanium-gold mixture appears to be an inter-metallic compound, not an alloy. While the hardness and corrosion resistance should be excellent, as described there, inter-metallic compounds are brittle and it is unlikely that a Ti-Au compound will have better properties than usual and cheaper tough ceramics, like silicon nitride or zirconia. The most important advantage of metallic alloys over alternatives for structural applications is their much higher toughness, an inter-metallic Ti-Au compound does not have this advantage, so I doubt that it can find an application.
- Exmoor 6y ago> If they could just kindly bring the asteroid back, every person on the planet—all 7.5 billion of us—would get roughly $1.3 billion. As long as you ignore the laws of supply in demand.
- scotty79 6y agoAs long as you limit depth of your analysis to math taught in the 4th grade. :-)
- IgorPartola 6y agoMaybe I am missing something but while the monetary value of the metals would not add up to that sum of money, wouldn’t we actually add a bunch of value to our global economy if we made these metals virtually free, therefore making the cost of goods associated with those metals go down significantly?
- dejj 6y ago> every person on the planet—all 7.5 billion of us—would get roughly $1.3 billion. This is Cunningham's Law applied to attract publicity.
- daenz 6y agoThat's a generous interpretation. I'm not entirely convinced the author knows that it doesn't work this way. Some people do have a very simplistic understanding of money and value, and the quoted statement would "make sense" to them at face value. These are often the same people who say "free X" when X is funded by tax dollars.
- wrs 6y agoOne could say that the Robb Report is targeted at a readership that has a very simplistic understanding of money and value.
- globular-toast 6y agoHeadlines like this are what keep the average person so far away from understanding money and economics. It's so absurd for so many reasons.
- achow 6y agoThe true value of it is not on earth but in space itself. If it is used to build mega city sized space station then its value would be multi fold of that on earth.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoThis. Space based mining is going to be huge, and probably the real reason spacex exists, as colonising Mars doesn't really make any sense. Building our own habitats in space will be how we populate the solar system, rather than trying to live on a dead rock like Mars.
- ctdonath 6y agoThe sense of colonizing Mars is abundance of raw materials (a whole planet worth right there) and the convenience of gravity (put something down, it tends to stay there). Space has benefits, but is defined by being devoid of resources, and stuff tends to drift off.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoRight. Mars real estate is not as desirable as Earth real estate, but on the other hand there's a whole planet just sitting there ripe for the taking. Someone is going to take it, you can bet.
- ctdonath 6y agoThis. Moving stuff up and down the gravity well is expensive. Having an abundant supply of mundane metals already above that well would vastly improve launch costs, there being much less to launch. The trick is getting asteroid mining, transport, and refining costs under $640/lb (current Falcon Heavy to-LEO cost).
- spockz 6y agoYou don’t need to go under it per se. The supply of falcon heavy launches is still limited in both quantity and scheduling. I’m sure its price will go up when the demand increases to provide for ferrying material up.
- sudo_raspberry 6y agoDoes anyone else find it annoying that people have been valuing objects in space?
- sp332 6y agoWhy, do you think objects in space don't have value?
- double-a 6y agoSo, everyone here has realized how inane this article is given that it doesn't account for the price of Fe and Ni plummeting once this much supply is introduced to the market. But what is the actual value of something like this? Surely something comparable has happened in the past where a big reserve of some rare mineral has been found and monopolized, and its price didn't go to zero.
- ip26 6y agoIt seems impossible to predict. The reason the price would not go to zero would be that, at the new lower price point, newly viable applications are found. What will these applications be? We can only guess.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Buttons840 6y agoWhat are the properties of Nickel? Would we have Nickel pipes and faucets, and Nickel covered cars?
- clord 6y agoWe already do. Several grades of stainless steel use a lot of nickel, and these are used in many applications. Also it is quite expensive which prevents it from being used generally.
- marcosdumay 6y agoWe live over a much larger ball full of Fe and Ni. In fact, the actual value of a hard to get Fe reserve is 0. The ground is full of it, and it's much easier to get here. We would have to compare the costs of mining an asteroid with deep mining on Earth to discover if the Ni has any value, it's very likely 0 too, but I don't think anybody knows for sure.
- nate_meurer 6y ago
- jeffrwells 6y agoCould anyone explain how exactly they know an asteroid is made out of certain material? What data are they observing from a telescope that tells them it’s iron and nickel, vs some other metal, vs rock? Especially with such precision around the composition
- bombcar 6y agohttp://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/72-our-solar-system/comets-meteors-and-asteroids/asteroids/295-how-are-asteroid-compositions-and-classifications-determined-intermediate http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/72-our-sol... Infrared spectrometers.
- BurningFrog 6y agoFrom https://www.swri.org/press-release/16-psyche-asteroid-surface-observation-ultraviolet-wavelengths https://www.swri.org/press-release/16-psyche-asteroid-surfac... > “We were able to identify for the first time on any asteroid what we think are iron oxide ultraviolet absorption bands,” she said. “This is an indication that oxidation is happening on the asteroid, which could be a result of the solar wind hitting the surface.” You can also calculate density from gravity interactions, but I don't know if asteroids are big enough for that.
- mmaunder 6y agoPerhaps there’s more value in bringing it home to an Earth orbit rather than landing it. Then using it for space based manufacturing. The cost savings of not having to lift that much metal from the gravity well may be the asteroid’s real value.
- S_A_P 6y agoThis seems like the right way to think about it to me. Space manufacturing seems like an inevitability at some point in the future.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoMight be better to crash it into Mars, then build settlements on mars to mine it there and could use as needed for the settlements.
- mmaunder 6y agoInteresting idea. You’d probably need to take a multi century view because it would eject a lot of dust into the atmosphere for a long time. You also run the risk of damaging the planet or it’s orbit. But assuming you achieve the goal, it’s one hell of a resource.
- neurocline 6y agoTo put this into context, this is enough to build dozens of Death Stars.
- nealabq 6y agoA Nickel (USA 5-cent coin) weighs almost exactly 5g, which is useful to know. So 200 nickels is a kg. 16 Psyche's mass is 2.72x10^19 kg. Let's say 10^19 kgs of that is nickel. With that you could mint 2x10^21 US-nickels, equivalent to 10^20 US-dollars. The article reports that the asteroid is only worth 10^19 US-dollars, so we could buy 10 more asteroids with all the nickels from 16 Psyche. And thus solve all the world's problems.
- credit_guy 6y agoThe article is a bit sensationalist and free of substance. The asteroid is interesting though. NASA finds it so interesting in fact that they will have a space probe visit it in 2026 (it will launch next year and take 4 years to go there) [1] What's the realistic potential profit from this asteroid in terms of space mining? Obviously not trillions. Anything you mine there you need to bring back, and the delta-v from the asteroid belt to low earth orbit is about 5 km/s. From the rocket equation it follows that you need about 2 tons of propellant for each ton of cargo. But unfortunately, you'll need to bring that fuel with you from the Earth. You end up with many, many tons of propellant for each ton of cargo. So anything that has a price less than about 10 times the cost of the propellant has no chance of ever being profitable, so iron and nickel are out. Gold is not though. Or platinum, or other precious metals. All in all, the wikipedia page on potential space mining projects lists the estimated profit from this asteroid at $1.78 BN. [2] [1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/16-psyche/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/as... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Potential_targets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Potential_targ...
- alexpc201 6y agoBeltalowda, walowda ke!