Let's capture and harvest asteroid 2004 MN4

[ideaguy]

I believe one of the ultimate results of a good space program will be active harvesting of asteroids from the asteroid belt as a terrestrial pollution free source of metals here on earth. The asteroid 2004 MH4 is like a gift from God. We have 24 years to figure out how to capture it, putting it in either earth or lunar orbit, smelting it in space and using the metals to either build in space, or shape them into flying bodies and glide them down to earth for use down here. If the federal government funds this, then they could sell the metals to fund themselves. <br /><br />Making some coarse assumptions about asteroid 2004 MH4, (1000 ft across, heavy metal asteroid, about 50% nickel, nickel cost about $2/lb) this one asteroid is worth over $200 billion dollars in the nickel in it alone. <br /><br />We have 24 years to do this. Let's forget the pointless manned mission to Mars. Let's even forget the moon. Let's focus on 2004 MH4. All the science and technology spin-offs that would have occurred from those other missions will still occur. And then some. We will also start developing the technology to deflect the future planet-killer asteroid which will happen some day.<br />The Ideaguy<br />

 

[Leovinus]

I just get this funny feeling that it would cost more to capture it than it we would get out of it -- especially if we screwed up and crashed it into Earth. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[thechemist]

This will surely upset the nickel industry. The price of nickel will fall to zero, and the whole space mining bussiness will declare bankruptcy <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <em>I feel better than James Brown.</em> </div>

 

[redwhitearcher]

Summing up the 2 replies:<br />Even if it was made of gold there are 2 major factors:<br />1. The costs of harvesting it will greatly out number the revunue for it even if it was puro gold.<br />2. As soon as you will put such an amount of precious metals or anythign else on the market you will colapse the whole market since the reason for high prices is the lack of something.

 

[CalliArcale]

Pretty much. That's always the ultimate problem in space mining -- it depresses the very market it relies on. But eventually things will get to a point where it is neccesary. It's not in the forseeable future, though.<br /><br />Great to see you back, RWA!!! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[no_way]

"As soon as you will put such an amount of precious metals or anythign else on the market you will colapse the whole market since the reason for high prices is the lack of something. "<br /><br />You may crash this one market, but not the ones that depend on it. For instance, if i'd be planning to import truckloads of PGMs from some asteroid or moon, i'd make _sure_ to buy tons of stocks in fuel cell industry first.<br />Because you see, given cheap platinum, you can make cheap fuel cells en masse.<br /><br />In other words, the "lack of something" is not a good thing, taken globally. If you increase availability of this once scarce resource availability of all derived products ( and GDP ) will increase from it.

 

[CalliArcale]

Oh, absolutely, and well pointed out. But since the people who mine for nickel/platinum/etc are presently the people who sell it directly to manufacturers and whose livelihood depends on the price of said metal, they wouldn't have that much motivation to go harvest an asteroid. That's why this kind of thing will become a reality, but not immediately. It'll become a reality when the manufacturers start bypassing the suppliers and doing the mining themselves, I suspect. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[thalion]

If we ever mine the asteroids/planets for metals, I have a feeling that they'll be much more useful for building <i>in situ</i> projects than imported to Earth at greater cost.

 

[ideaguy]

Some more numbers. The commodity price of nickel has gone up from about $1.75 to $10.00 per lb in the last year or two. Because of increased worldwide demand, especially fueled by the chinese juggernaut. Stainless steel production is at all time highs, but most manufacturers are operating at a loss because they can't get their prices infront of the steep inflation of nickel prices. <br /><br />So bringing in a new source of nickel, equal to about one half of know world reserves (which includes deep sea mining of manganese nuggets, which hasn't been done and probably shouldn't for pollution concerns) would be a good thing, to bring nickel prices back down to $2/lb., upon which my estimate was based.<br /><br />This mission wouldn't be that far fetched. 2004 MH4 is in a near earth orbit, with a orbital frequency just a little shorter than earths. So once per year this thing is relatively already close to us (compared to mars or the asteroid belt or comets). So that gives us 10 years to develop thrust technologies capable of altering its course and speed. 10 years to ship the equipment to it, and construct it. And 4 years of course manipulation.<br /><br />This is the sort of challenge which could unify people of the world behind the space program.

 

[scottb50]

Then how many times in 25 years is it near enough to Earth to meet up with? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[ideaguy]

The more I check into this, the more excited I get.<br /><br />The relative velocities of earth and 2004 MN4 are not that different. 2004 MN4 has a 323-day orbit which extends slightly outsides earths orbit and slightly inside Venus' orbit. So it periodically comes quite close to earth. (Although when it is close is probably not when we would launch a mission to it.)<br /><br />It has been only 0.1 to 0.2 AU from earth from Nov. 04 to Feb. 05.<br /><br />It will be less than 0.25 AU from Earth all of april 06.<br /><br />It will be less than 0.2 AU from Oct 31 2012 to mar 11 2013.<br /><br />It will be less than 0.1 AU from earth in March 2021<br />and less than 0.2 AU in dec 2027<br /><br />and less than 25,000 miles from earth on april 13 2029.<br /><br />You can see all of this pictured dramatically at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/<br />

 

[scottb50]

2012 would be about right to shoot for. If nothing else the pictures inbound towards Earth in 2029 would be well worth the effort. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[quasar2]

if not capture it, then why not put implant useful materials on it? if it`s going toward Mars, future missions could use any materials they could get. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[grooble]

Could you build an asteroid base? You'd get a free trip then.

 

[yurkin]

At the very least we need to land a probe on it to detect its density distributaries and subsequently in composition. Normally this would take a powerful radar. But the Earths Gravity will be ping it for us. We just have to hear the echoes. <br />This is important not just for scientific purposes. If the density is low and it’s loosely held together then it will break up in subsequent orbits. <br />Sending chunks of rocks down below.<br />

 

[starbaby57]

Right after returning to the moon, I favor visits to the Trojan asteroids and asteroids like 2004MN4. The Trojan asteroids are a nice intermediate step between the Moon and Mars, and are a natural location for sub-surface outposts, mining, etc. If fact, these were mentioned early-on in the Presidents' Vision for Exploration. I hope they remain a key component of the vision...

 

[cyrostir]

if capturing it requires too much money, why not build a probe to land and hitch a ride? It would be able to record its later encounters and such, study the asteroid......I mean this is a once in a lifetime encouter, why not take advantage of it?

 

[spacefire]

I think it depends on how we plan to capture the asteroid: sending a nuclear rocket that would process material from the asteroid and eject it to generate an impulse definitely cost alot of money, and requires some new technologies to be developed.<br /><br />Another way could be to have a few mirrors at various LaGrange points, at least 3 of them, which would focus sunlight and 'burn' holes in the asteroid through which vaporized material would escape generating impulse. This would also work well as a defense against asteroids and comets.<br /><br />Cheaper would be to have an Ion thruster attach to the steroid gradually changin its orbit, but that might take so long to achieve capture that it would make the endeavour very impractical. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>http://asteroid-invasion.blogspot.com</p><p>http://www.solvengineer.com/asteroid-invasion.html </p><p> </p> </div>

 

[spacefire]

with the focused light system I proposed, it wouldn't really matter if you burn small spots on the surface for short periods of time. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>http://asteroid-invasion.blogspot.com</p><p>http://www.solvengineer.com/asteroid-invasion.html </p><p> </p> </div>

 

[scottb50]

I just wonder how much force you could exert this way. You might cause some outgassing, that could provide some momentum, but by itself focused light wouldn't do very much, especially considering the mass of an asteroid. Just like using a Nuclear weapon, it would take a lot of force to change an orbit and if you could actually blow up an object it's momentum would carry the remnants to the same place they were headed anyway. <br /><br />I would think the only way to alter the orbit of an object would require some sort of mass driver, maybe a Nuclear weapon propelling mass from the asteroid would work. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[SpaceKiwi]

Just a thought, based on the recent posts. With respect to asteroids hitting (or not) the planet, I've always tended to see discussions about the necessity of pushing such objects off a collision course. Or, alternately, blowing them up.<br /><br />Surely the easiest way to avoid a collision is not to work on it's trajectory, but on it's velocity? And my non-scientific brain seems to think that exerting a very slight increase in velocity would be the easiest to achieve, and result in the asteroid intersecting Earth's orbit prior to the Big Blue Ball's arrival? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em><font size="2" color="#ff0000">Who is this superhero?  Henry, the mild-mannered janitor ... could be!</font></em></p><p><em><font size="2">-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</font></em></p><p><font size="5">Bring Back The Black!</font></p> </div>

 

[mrmorris]

<font color="yellow">"...but by itself focused light wouldn't do very much, especially considering the mass of an asteroid. "</font><br /><br />I think the bigger problem (or at least <b>as</b> big) would be getting a controlled thrust vector. There's no nozzle on the asteroid to direct the flow of the outgassing. Assuming the 'hot-spot' hit at a 90-degree incidence to the surface of the asteriod, and assuming the surface it hit is perfectly flat, then the expansion would be hemispherical. 'Side' vectors from the expansion would cancel out, and the thrust would be directly away from the mirror.<br /><br />Excepting, of course, that both assumptions are really bad ones that won't really happen 99.99...999% of the time. In that case -- the expansion of gas/materials is going to be assymetrical and the thrust vector is going to be indeterminate.

 

[spacefire]

yeah vextoring the thrust would be a problem, but I think with practice a certain degree of trajectory control can be achieved. The beauty is you don't need to get to the asteroid to do it, plus the energy is free coming straight from the sun.<br />Of course, a laser would work better. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>http://asteroid-invasion.blogspot.com</p><p>http://www.solvengineer.com/asteroid-invasion.html </p><p> </p> </div>

 

[frodo1008]

The first thing to do would be to develop a robotic probe (far cheaper than a manned mission) that would examine the composition and strength of the asteroid itself. We need to know if the asteroid has the strength to even maneuver it by any means. We do know that this would at least be possible as it is a metallic asteroid, but until some kind of probe actually examines the composition and particularly the actual physical properties of the asteroid we can not be actually sure if it has the strength to even be maneuvered. The one thing we do not want to do is to try to maneuver this asteroid and actually endanger the Earth itself by either breaking up the asteroid (and having possibly large chunks hit the Earth in 2029, remember it will be coming very close to the Earth anyway!), or by accidentally changing the asteroids trajectory in such a manner that the relatively close encounter of 25,000 miles (actually inside if the geocentric orbit) becomes a hit! Such a probe should be ready for the 2012 encounter at the very latest!!<br /><br />If this asteroid could indeed be captured and mined its resources would be of far greater use in the building of space infrastructure than in being shipped down to the Earth. Until we have some kind of VERY cheap means of moving bulk materials from space to the Earth this would make such materials just as expensive (if not more expensive) than those material that are already here on the Earth itself. <br /><br />I have often thought that one of the best future uses for the ISS (and this would mean having at least 6 people on board ISS) would be research into how to smelt and process metals into useful finished materials to be used for the future infrastructure of space. We know that the materials of such a civilization are out in space on both the moon and the asteroids. Due to the relatively low gravities of both the moon and the asteroids and the lack of atmosphere on such bodies these materials will be relatively easily obtai

 

[holmec]

Good Idea.<br /><br />A couple of thoughts.<br /><br />I imagined that the easiest way is to have robotic miners who land on the asteroid and break up the rock and have robotic transporters that take the raw material to a solar or earth orbit processing facility that is manned. No need to capture it since the sun already did. By using several transporters you create a train of raw material to the processing plant from the asteroid. Also you can have a system that can mine one asteroid and then go to the next.<br /><br />What to do with the material? Maybe its better to make finished products for space stations and ships in space. It may be far fetched, but the more you build in space the less you have to launch from Earth. Common sense.<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#0000ff"><em>"SCE to AUX" - John Aaron, curiosity pays off</em></font></p> </div>