NASA Funded Project Could Mine Asteroids For Water With Sunlight

MarkWhittington writes: One of the more precious resources that asteroid miners are going after is water, something that is in abundance on Earth and, oddly enough, in space as well but not as easily be acquired. Iron, nickel and platinum group metals will certainly be valuable, but future space travelers will need water, not only for drinking, bathing, and agriculture but for rocket fuel. A story in Space.com reports on a new asteroid mining technique being funded by NASA that would use sunlight, concentrated by mirrors, to extract water out of excavated asteroids. The process is called "optical mining."

Comments

What works on Earth doesn't work in space

[Anonymous Coward]

This is certainly possible on Earth, but is highly unlikely to work on an asteroid. The problem is that any water released through the optical mining process will be vaporized almost instantaneously because, at the extreme low pressure present, water will exist only as a solid or a gas. At the proximity to the sun and in the presence of intense heating from concentrated sunlight, water vapor will be the result. Owing to the extremely low pressures, though non-zero, in space, the water vapor will almost immediately rush outward from the location it is mined from, making it virtually impossible to collect. Although this method offers opportunities to harness solar energy to extract valuable metals, it's virtually impossible to collect water this way.