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

Re:What works on Earth doesn't work in space

[taiwanjohn]

the water vapor will almost immediately rush outward from the location it is mined from, making it virtually impossible to collect

Maybe that's why the graphic shows a giant enclosure around the asteroid... you know, to capture the water vapor before it gets a way?

Troy Rising

[ma11achy]

Someone's been reading John Ringo :)

Either way, it's terrible leaving all that energy go to waste. Let's start bootstrapping ourselves up the Kardashev scale.

Technique

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I've often wondered whether enclosing the mining location in an envelope of some sort was really the most effective way to collect material in space. Surely either giving the target a spin or taking advantage of its existing spin while melting a spot, followed by an "ice cream scoop" collector might be more efficient? Afterwards it might end up looking a little like Vesta.

Re: What works on Earth doesn't work in space

[taiwanjohn]

Good points. And there are also some interesting possibilities with a multi-layer enclosure... You could inflate the space(s) between layers, providing rigidity. You could pump the "inflation fluid" through a mechanism to extract heat (or whatever). You could run electricity through the layers to use the Peltier effect for heat management. Even with a small amount of cooling, you could rapidly condense a lot of the water vapor, thus reducing the internal pressure of the enclosure. Lots of possibilities there...