Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This isn't the first meteorite that Curiosity has encountered.

From http://io9.gizmodo.com/curiosity-rover-finds-a-huge-metal-me...:

... It's an iron meteorite, similar to ones found in years past by Curiosity's forerunners Spirit and Opportunity, but is considerably larger than any of the ones the MER rovers came across… in fact, at 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide this may very well be the biggest meteorite ever discovered on Mars!

I am seriously wondering what the density of meteoritic material on the surface of Mars is. I am also seriously wondering if it might be an economically recoverable resource. Instead of launching an asteroid mining mission, you could land on Mars, drive your rover around picking up nickel-iron meteorites on the surface, and load them up on your rocket and return them to Earth.

Now of course you need more delta-v than an asteroid mission, but on the other hand we already know where Mars is, and unlike many asteroid mining candidates it has a relatively friendly orbit: no wild inclination, not outrageously elliptical, and somewhat frequent (and very regular) conjunctions with Earth.

The extra 5000 m/s of delta-v to return anything to Earth is certainly significant, but since you can use in situ propellant production it's not nearly so bad as it sounds.

And we already want to go to Mars anyway.

You really don't want to go all the way to Mars for nickel or iron :-). Now if chunks of platinum, gold, silver, and palladium are laying about to be picked up, well that is a different story. 100kg of that stuff my be worth 3 - 5 million $ when you got it back here.

On the plus side, if you don't need to smelt iron ore to get metallic iron you can build stuff on Mars without first building a massive processing plant. (steel mills are smaller than iron smelters in my experience)

> 100kg of that stuff my be worth 3 - 5 million $

That might not be enough to break even.

The asymptotics work out much better with Asteroid mining.

Curiosity cost $2.5 billion. Round it up to 3 since it's a round trip. You'll have to bring back 200,000 pounds of platinum to break even. That's like 3 or 4 Sherman tanks.

It will get cheaper as we get more reusable launch vehicles!

Resource prices will also drop in response to a larger supply. That's what I was taught once upon a time. Now of course you have the likes of Goldman Sachs manipulating prices by stockpiling resources to lower supply.

I was imagining that your typical nickel-iron meteorite would have a couple of percent of interesting impurities. I couldn't find any really good sources of information, but it sounds like -- with the exception of Cobalt -- any other recoverable metals would be in the parts per million, so not worth the trouble.

On the other hand my plan to cast meteoritic iron into shells and shoot them to Earth might still be practical, if only there was something suitably valuable to put into them...

Just be careful you don't accidentally turn up with 100 KT.

Price is a function of demand ... and supply.

It's hard to imagine the trip just for those metals, but it might make early settlement easier if you have metals you'd normally have to mine on Earth, just sitting around. That said, probably not a problem for our lifetimes.

Economics of the current price of metals is not helpful here. The opportunity cost of spending time, earth resources, and effort into getting more metal that we already have on earth is not worth it. The value of mars exploration is to get things / people out there and discover what we can do, not to appease some bean counter or increment some billionaire's bank balance.

Seems more useful to use as a local resource for building tools and habitats. Ie. to scale up earth supplied tools.

Mars will almost certainly have more meteorites since it has much less of an atmosphere than earth for them to burn up. It coild be viable if we get infrastructure there first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com