Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Asteroid Worth 70k Times the Global Economy
robbreport.com
robbreport.com
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.
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.
If it was about the core, the answer for Ni would also be obvious.
Perhaps I misunderstood. What do you mean by "deep mining" for nickel?
Well, delivery costs play a role as well.
If you're looking for iron for use on Earth, you're right. If you're looking for iron to use in space construction, the asteroid material is likely much cheaper.
If one believes (as I do) that the human race will either move into space or go extinct, then asteroids will be far more important for the future of our society.
...and so would the prices of everything else. As well as the number of life-bearing planets in the solar system.
Imagine the cost of launching that much iron into space...
The rise in prices made Spanish exports uncompetitive, forcing Spain to spend its bullion to buy finished imports from other countries.
Aluminum. Initially so expensive that the tip of the Washington Monument was made with it, then price plummetted after new refining methods.
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.
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.
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder...
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.
Titanium is quite literally dirt cheap (if you don’t need it refined anyway), and nitrogen is the majority component of air.
TiN is a ceramic.
Not for iron and nickel. Iron is the most abundant element on earth and the 4th most abundant in the crust. It's practically everywhere. Almost all of the cost comes from processing and transporting it. Even if there ever were a shortage, it'd almost certainly be more economical to mine it from the mantle or crust than fly to the asteroid belt and bring it back. Iron is really far down the list of elements we need to worry about running out of.
The article's kind of silly, TBH.
Making nickel so easily obtainable that it's almost worthless, would be incredibly valuable to society.
Where people here are criticizing the article for its hyperbolic "everyone would be a billionaire!" rhetoric, it's not because we don't believe the metals are valuable, it's because the article conflates price with value.
If it is used to build mega city sized space station then its value would be multi fold of that on earth.
Someone is going to take it, you can bet.
The trick is getting asteroid mining, transport, and refining costs under $640/lb (current Falcon Heavy to-LEO cost).
2. Competition is the issue: can we mine & deliver metals from an asteroid to LEO cheaper than lifting same out of the gravity well?
2b. Might that consideration of ground-to-orbit resources include removing materials from future terrestrial use?
(Was very expensive before we figured out how to manufacture it cheaply)
As long as you ignore the laws of supply in demand.
This is Cunningham's Law applied to attract publicity.
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/as...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Potential_targ...
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.
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
Infrared spectrometers.
> “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.