Believe it or not, Mars has both weather and seasons. Both affect the amount of dust in the atmosphere. If you really want to be clever, go play around a few of the 80,000 images from the mars rovers and see how much green you get by combining the red, green, and blue filtered images. You can compare images that show the color target (used specifically to make sure the color balance is right) taken on earth before launch to images taken on Mars, where the red dirt is pretty clearly visible. The color target looks the same.
More importantly though, since you've discovered this massive cover-up that none of us have been able to, you should take the next step and find out why. Does it truly benefit NASA to hide the existance of life, or at least green, on Mars?
As long as we're talking about color, I wanted to toss in a bit of little-known trivia: While on earth the sky is blue and sunsets are often red, on Mars, the sky is red and sunsets are often blue.
What would be the drawbacks of maintaining a list of crooked URL's, then having the program add them to the hosts file with an IP mapping to a safe site that explains why the site was blocked and how to unblock it if desired? This could actually be run as a seperate program, as needed, instead of adding that extra (tiny) bit of load time and another toolbar. Run the program and it checks the netcraft list against the hosts file, adding or deleting (if a domain was sold or turned legit) as needed. It would also be easy to allow the creation of a local safe list in case netcraft had any false positives.
I'm not saying this is a better method. It's just the idea that popped into my head, and I'd like to know if there are drawbacks, in case I or anyone else ever has motivation to create such a program.
Well, you can overdesign it, so that any smaller impact will not be sufficient to lead to failure. Most of the larger objects in orbit are theoretically being tracked, so if the orbits intersect, you can move the base platform (remember the proposal is to use a sea-based platform). The probability of a larger extra-terrestrial object like 2004 MN4 or the more frequent smaller rocks is really tiny. Consider how many satellites we have in the space, how long they've been there, and how many have been fatally damaged by meteroids (none). That should give you an idea of the risk.
What happens if it is cut? To say it will be more dangerous that the impact that killed the dinosaurs shows a lot of ignorance. First, the space-side anchor will be slung off into space at fairly high speed. Even if it's orbit did ever intersect the earth, it will be about as dangerous as the space station. Second, the ribbon will be a very light weight material, probably with a very high surface area to mass ratio (the climber concept requires a large, flat ribbon). It will have a lot of drag as it enters the atmosphere, probably either burning up or fluttering to the ground like heavy cloth.
A far more realistic concern is the materials safety. Some questions have been asked, which I've never heard answered, about whether nanotubes present a health risk. We're talking about a very small and strong particle that's chemically stable. If I breathe them in, will they sit in my lungs and slowly tear them to pieces or will they be exhaled? Will my body be able to break them down if I ingest them? These aren't necessarily project-killing concerns, however. The carbon fiber composites used by the aerospace industry can mess up your lungs if you inhale them, but they're fairly large unless they're cut up, and they're contained safely in their epoxy in the final product.
Taking that piece of crap off-road would be a really bad idea. Seriously. The chassis is basically a slightly modified Tahoe. I've seen a video of some moron trying to crawl some small rocks with an H2. He's guns it as he going over one and had tie-rod snap in somewhat spectacular fashion. The original Hummer, or bet yet, a Humvee would be far better. Besides, just think how much CO2 you'd be adding to the martian atmosphere.
Personally I think it will take off, due to anticipated demand by India and especially China to haul as many passengers as possible with one plane between cities.
That seems like a potentially bad thing. Every year or so, a grossly overloaded ferry capsizes over there in bad weather and several hundred people die. I think the count was well over 1000 last time. I could just imagine some budget airline cramming 800+ people in A380, fuel heavy for a long flight, in cold wet weather with de-icing gear overdue for inspection. The end result would be 800 fewer Indian or Chinese middle class.
Also, my last flight was on a 777. It was loading at 2 gates, and a 747 was simultaneously loading at the next 2 gates. It took 2 hours to board and we were almost an hour late leaving. Obviously, simply allocating more gates, as others suggested, won't cure the problem. Sure, I think the A380 will sell, but I doubt they will break 500, unlike the 800 they claim they will sell.
My understanding (coming from my grandfather, who is a retired Boeing engineer) is that what technically happened is that McDonald Douglas actually bought Boeing, but kept the name based on the reputation it carried. Since then, the company has half-poked at a billion different ideas, finally committed to one of them, and has specialized in losing billions of dollars, bribing Air Force officials, and having executives sleep with sub-executives who work directly under them. I'm really not sure why I keep trying to get a job there, other than the fact that it's not in stinking California, unlike a certain almost legitimate aerospace company I know of.
Foreign producers simply do not get US military contracts. It's a security thing. If the US aerospace industry falls to such a sad state that keeping our technology a secret has to take a back seat to having technology that works, then it might get hired out overseas, but since we still have some of the best equipment in the world, the guys in charge would rather the nobody else know how it works. You can't even get a job on most defense-related projects unless you're a US citizen.
In fact, you have to get rid of nearly all of the energy. Most of the energy that is converted to electricity is then used to operate something which then converts it back to heat (like a computer chip). The two energy expenditures I can think of that don't yield waste heat are the propulsion system (ideally), and the radios (again, ideally).
I read somewhere that the Brayton cycle generators they plan to use will have a thermal efficiency of approximately 25%. That means that a 10kW electrical system will need to deal with 40kW of heat. Of course, I expect it would be possible to use a significant portion of that to heat the propulsion fuel.
I thought you might like to know that nucleotides are those cool little thingies in your DNA that make up the genetic code.
The current plan is for fission reactors to be used outside of an earth orbit. Earth is close enough to the sun that solar panels are still a good choice for energy, so reactors aren't needed. It's on the deep space probes, like the Jupiter Ice Moons Orbiter (if it ever happens) where this becomes useful. It could also potentially be used on a manned Mars mission since the extra power it produces could be used to run an ion propulsion system.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the article. They have cited two areas where they plan "become more consistent." That's a marketing phrase. It means nothing. I've heard a comment attributed to someone in the IE design team suggesting that Microsoft didn't want to fully accept the W3C standards for reasons I don't remember. They claimed the standards would restrict them. I claim they restrict us poor saps who have to find work arounds for a funky box model and simple CSS2 applications like dynamic nested lists.
I've been anxiously awaiting more info on IE7, hoping it would turn around and embrace the W3C recommendations. Instead, this news worries me simply because it is so limited.
That's pretty cool. I always wanted to build a nanotube (megatube?) with those silly ball and stick molecule kits you play with in intro chemistry, but they never come with more than 15 carbons. One time a bunch of my friends and I pooled together a couple kits and made a bucky-tube, but the teacher wasn't that impressed. He already knew we were nerds and was just worried about us getting the right number of carbons in each kit when we took it apart.
The submarine battle comparison was much better. You'd never see your target and the tactics would probably be based around stealth. You could use radar to look for a target, but the other guy could probably detect your signal at twice the distance you can get a good return signal from, then he would know which direction you are.
Some of the images actually are the same. I've compared some of the USGS aerial photos I've found on terraserver to images of the same locations from google and they are exactly the same in some locations. In particular I looked at McChord Airforce base. The C-17's were parked in the same spots, pointing in the same directions, with the same misc equipment scattered around. The shadows pointed the same directions and lengths and the grass was the same color.
I've heard 90 minutes and I've heard 3 hours. I guess the 90 minutes must just be a further break down of the 3 hour cycles.
From my own experience, it definitely seems to work. If I take I nap and I wake up before 1.5 or 3 hours, I feel really groggy. If I wake up in the morning after getting less than 3 cycles (actually about 8.5 hours for me), I generally have more trouble motivating myself to move. In fact, it seems to be harder to wake up after 7 hours of sleep than 6, I assume due to the cycles. Thank goodness graduation is less than 3 weeks away. Then those horrible all-nighters in the lonely engineering lab will be over.
Presumably, the -58 deg C temperature they quoted is the average surface temperature of the soil. Anything above the soil would have a different temperature depending on the angle and amount of sunlight it receives, as well as it's reflectivity and emissivity. Of course, NASA already dealt with this for the Apollo landings, so we know it can be handled.
Except that as a computer tech on a college campus (where explicit websites are assumed to represent a significant portion of the traffic), I see far more girls have with serious popup issues.
What are the odds? Without accounting for anywhere near all of the factors, about 1 in 2500, give or take. That's pretty low, but high enough that NASA has considered it. The backup won't launch unless the root problem with the primary can be identified and they are reasonably sure it can be prevented on the backup.
On reflection, 1 in 2500 might even be a little high. It's based on an old estimate (that has held roughly true) that 1 in 50 will suffer catostrophic damage during launch. A lot of the failure scenarios involved in producing that projection involve the loss of the orbiter during the launch phase, in which case a rescue mission would be pointless. Case in point: the Challenger explosion.
Haha! Now that is funny enough I have to respond to it. When I think about it, it actually makes sense for you to call the development of technology designed to reduce collateral deaths "war mongering," because you're also in favor of the deaths of few dedicated, hard-working men and women with families. I'm all for keeping the Tomahawks inside their launch tubes, but if we need them, guiding them precisely with GPS sure beats carpet bombing Baghdad.
Next time, be a man and log in when you troll. The karma threat might make you think a little before you post.
Sometimes the old solutions are best. Instead of terrorists, though, who you definitely can not trust, how about criminals who have a reason to try to make reparations. Offer them a chance to work off their debt to society, the main cost being that (if current trends continue) approximately 1 in 50 will die. I'm talking about shooting them into space to handle all these NASA projects, of course. Society won't necessarily miss them if something goes wrong, but they've got a reason not to deliberately screw it up.
The only problem I see is that ordinary people like me might suddenly decide to rob a bank for the opportunity to go into space.
I can't believe I'm joining a theo discussion on Slashdot
I would contend that it's worthwhile to least worth be respectful simply because He can throw it down on anyone who is rude. I could go further, but that would just make me another close-minded raving Catholic lunatic. Bottom line: if He doesn't exist, the parent comment is irrelevant nonsense. If He does, we're not in the position to call the shots.
Reminds me of a story my freshmen physics professor told.
When he was young, he got a big magnet from an old radar that had been scrapped. He snuck it into the arcade in his backpack with the intention of manuevering the ball through the extra life gate with it. Unfortunately, when he moved it over the ball, the ball jumped up and smacked the glass with enough force to break it. He had to refine his technique a little bit and pick a different arcade, but it eventually worked.
My understanding is that the costs are primarily the salaries for the members of the mission team still involved in the operations. There is still the business of planning the daily drives and sorting through the spectroscopy data and pictures they receive back. They have also been continuing to develop improved flight software (funny that they still call it flight software when it's on the ground) and just did an update 2-3 weeks ago to improve autonomous driving based on what they've learned so far. That development will be probably be directly applicable to future missions. I suppose there is also some cost related to having antennae dedicate part of their time and bandwidth to receiving the data streams, as well.
The part about political clout was a bunch of crap, probably added in by that Roland guy. The professor was talking about heating fuel, not automotive. He's not talking about driving your car on this, he's talking about heating rural homes, many of which are currently heated by wood, oil, or coal. The idea is to use grass pellets instead of wood pellets in special stoves or furnaces. He's claiming that this can be done more economically than wood pellets.
I'm unaware of any regulations keeping an entreprenuer from starting a business processing pellets and selling them for use in wood pellet stoves and furnaces. Either no one has the guts to make the initial investment, or it's not actually economical. If this is really being used in Europe already, I suspect the former.
I grew up on a farm in western Washington. We get about 150 bales per acre on the first cutting in May. Each bale is 50 pounds, so 7500 pounds. We get about half that on the second cutting in late August. In better growing areas, you can probably get a total of about 15000 pounds per acre for the whole growing season from three cuttings. Total cost including land, equipment, and labor is about $1/bale. You also need about about 6 ft^3 per bale for storage, so 90,000 ft^3 per acre. Pellets can be made more dense (~25 lbs/ft^3 I would estimate), and I suspect that's what the author was talking about.
I don't have any energy values for hay or costs for wood pellets, but I figure on Slashdot someone else might find my numbers helpful for comparing the two. I assume he's talking about an alternative to wood pellets for rural heating.
There's a lot of problems with this. First, do you know of any large asteroids made out of platinum orbiting close to the sun? There's some that contain significant amounts, but it's not like you can just grab a one ton chunk and expect it to contain 1 ton of platinum.
Second, contrary to what you see in Armegeddon, asteroid mining techniques are not that advanced yet. By not advanced I mean non-existant. In fact, there's only been just one landing ever on an asteroid, and that actually something more of a low-gravity crash.
Third, we don't have the capability right now to return a one ton payload. Genesis was returning at most a few milligrams, and it ended up making a hole in the ground.
Fourth, the one probe that did land on an asteroid cost $150 million and it was pretty small.
Fifth, $30 million return on each $110 million investment still yields a negative cash flow. I didn't even have to take economics to learn that. You need a 3.5 ton load just to break even (see point 3)
Sixth, if you flood the market, one ton of platinum is no longer going to be worth $30 million (or whatever the current price may be).
Seventh, while SpaceX is doing well so far, they haven't yet launched anything. Furthermore, the most mass they can theoretically get to escape velocity with their bigger rocket is 1.2 tons. You have to fit all your landing gear, mining equipment, and return vehicle in that.
This is the first time an autonomous repair mission has been attempted and $110 million is about what I would expect.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, Mars has both weather and seasons. Both affect the amount of dust in the atmosphere. If you really want to be clever, go play around a few of the 80,000 images from the mars rovers and see how much green you get by combining the red, green, and blue filtered images. You can compare images that show the color target (used specifically to make sure the color balance is right) taken on earth before launch to images taken on Mars, where the red dirt is pretty clearly visible. The color target looks the same.
More importantly though, since you've discovered this massive cover-up that none of us have been able to, you should take the next step and find out why. Does it truly benefit NASA to hide the existance of life, or at least green, on Mars?
As long as we're talking about color, I wanted to toss in a bit of little-known trivia: While on earth the sky is blue and sunsets are often red, on Mars, the sky is red and sunsets are often blue.
What would be the drawbacks of maintaining a list of crooked URL's, then having the program add them to the hosts file with an IP mapping to a safe site that explains why the site was blocked and how to unblock it if desired? This could actually be run as a seperate program, as needed, instead of adding that extra (tiny) bit of load time and another toolbar. Run the program and it checks the netcraft list against the hosts file, adding or deleting (if a domain was sold or turned legit) as needed. It would also be easy to allow the creation of a local safe list in case netcraft had any false positives.
I'm not saying this is a better method. It's just the idea that popped into my head, and I'd like to know if there are drawbacks, in case I or anyone else ever has motivation to create such a program.
Well, you can overdesign it, so that any smaller impact will not be sufficient to lead to failure. Most of the larger objects in orbit are theoretically being tracked, so if the orbits intersect, you can move the base platform (remember the proposal is to use a sea-based platform). The probability of a larger extra-terrestrial object like 2004 MN4 or the more frequent smaller rocks is really tiny. Consider how many satellites we have in the space, how long they've been there, and how many have been fatally damaged by meteroids (none). That should give you an idea of the risk.
What happens if it is cut? To say it will be more dangerous that the impact that killed the dinosaurs shows a lot of ignorance. First, the space-side anchor will be slung off into space at fairly high speed. Even if it's orbit did ever intersect the earth, it will be about as dangerous as the space station. Second, the ribbon will be a very light weight material, probably with a very high surface area to mass ratio (the climber concept requires a large, flat ribbon). It will have a lot of drag as it enters the atmosphere, probably either burning up or fluttering to the ground like heavy cloth.
A far more realistic concern is the materials safety. Some questions have been asked, which I've never heard answered, about whether nanotubes present a health risk. We're talking about a very small and strong particle that's chemically stable. If I breathe them in, will they sit in my lungs and slowly tear them to pieces or will they be exhaled? Will my body be able to break them down if I ingest them? These aren't necessarily project-killing concerns, however. The carbon fiber composites used by the aerospace industry can mess up your lungs if you inhale them, but they're fairly large unless they're cut up, and they're contained safely in their epoxy in the final product.
Taking that piece of crap off-road would be a really bad idea. Seriously. The chassis is basically a slightly modified Tahoe. I've seen a video of some moron trying to crawl some small rocks with an H2. He's guns it as he going over one and had tie-rod snap in somewhat spectacular fashion. The original Hummer, or bet yet, a Humvee would be far better. Besides, just think how much CO2 you'd be adding to the martian atmosphere.
Also, my last flight was on a 777. It was loading at 2 gates, and a 747 was simultaneously loading at the next 2 gates. It took 2 hours to board and we were almost an hour late leaving. Obviously, simply allocating more gates, as others suggested, won't cure the problem. Sure, I think the A380 will sell, but I doubt they will break 500, unlike the 800 they claim they will sell.
My understanding (coming from my grandfather, who is a retired Boeing engineer) is that what technically happened is that McDonald Douglas actually bought Boeing, but kept the name based on the reputation it carried. Since then, the company has half-poked at a billion different ideas, finally committed to one of them, and has specialized in losing billions of dollars, bribing Air Force officials, and having executives sleep with sub-executives who work directly under them. I'm really not sure why I keep trying to get a job there, other than the fact that it's not in stinking California, unlike a certain almost legitimate aerospace company I know of.
Foreign producers simply do not get US military contracts. It's a security thing. If the US aerospace industry falls to such a sad state that keeping our technology a secret has to take a back seat to having technology that works, then it might get hired out overseas, but since we still have some of the best equipment in the world, the guys in charge would rather the nobody else know how it works. You can't even get a job on most defense-related projects unless you're a US citizen.
In fact, you have to get rid of nearly all of the energy. Most of the energy that is converted to electricity is then used to operate something which then converts it back to heat (like a computer chip). The two energy expenditures I can think of that don't yield waste heat are the propulsion system (ideally), and the radios (again, ideally).
I read somewhere that the Brayton cycle generators they plan to use will have a thermal efficiency of approximately 25%. That means that a 10kW electrical system will need to deal with 40kW of heat. Of course, I expect it would be possible to use a significant portion of that to heat the propulsion fuel.
I thought you might like to know that nucleotides are those cool little thingies in your DNA that make up the genetic code.
The current plan is for fission reactors to be used outside of an earth orbit. Earth is close enough to the sun that solar panels are still a good choice for energy, so reactors aren't needed. It's on the deep space probes, like the Jupiter Ice Moons Orbiter (if it ever happens) where this becomes useful. It could also potentially be used on a manned Mars mission since the extra power it produces could be used to run an ion propulsion system.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the article. They have cited two areas where they plan "become more consistent." That's a marketing phrase. It means nothing. I've heard a comment attributed to someone in the IE design team suggesting that Microsoft didn't want to fully accept the W3C standards for reasons I don't remember. They claimed the standards would restrict them. I claim they restrict us poor saps who have to find work arounds for a funky box model and simple CSS2 applications like dynamic nested lists.
I've been anxiously awaiting more info on IE7, hoping it would turn around and embrace the W3C recommendations. Instead, this news worries me simply because it is so limited.
That's pretty cool. I always wanted to build a nanotube (megatube?) with those silly ball and stick molecule kits you play with in intro chemistry, but they never come with more than 15 carbons. One time a bunch of my friends and I pooled together a couple kits and made a bucky-tube, but the teacher wasn't that impressed. He already knew we were nerds and was just worried about us getting the right number of carbons in each kit when we took it apart.
Modern meaning no sails, I guess.
The submarine battle comparison was much better. You'd never see your target and the tactics would probably be based around stealth. You could use radar to look for a target, but the other guy could probably detect your signal at twice the distance you can get a good return signal from, then he would know which direction you are.
Some of the images actually are the same. I've compared some of the USGS aerial photos I've found on terraserver to images of the same locations from google and they are exactly the same in some locations. In particular I looked at McChord Airforce base. The C-17's were parked in the same spots, pointing in the same directions, with the same misc equipment scattered around. The shadows pointed the same directions and lengths and the grass was the same color.
I've heard 90 minutes and I've heard 3 hours. I guess the 90 minutes must just be a further break down of the 3 hour cycles.
From my own experience, it definitely seems to work. If I take I nap and I wake up before 1.5 or 3 hours, I feel really groggy. If I wake up in the morning after getting less than 3 cycles (actually about 8.5 hours for me), I generally have more trouble motivating myself to move. In fact, it seems to be harder to wake up after 7 hours of sleep than 6, I assume due to the cycles. Thank goodness graduation is less than 3 weeks away. Then those horrible all-nighters in the lonely engineering lab will be over.
Presumably, the -58 deg C temperature they quoted is the average surface temperature of the soil. Anything above the soil would have a different temperature depending on the angle and amount of sunlight it receives, as well as it's reflectivity and emissivity. Of course, NASA already dealt with this for the Apollo landings, so we know it can be handled.
Except that as a computer tech on a college campus (where explicit websites are assumed to represent a significant portion of the traffic), I see far more girls have with serious popup issues.
What are the odds? Without accounting for anywhere near all of the factors, about 1 in 2500, give or take. That's pretty low, but high enough that NASA has considered it. The backup won't launch unless the root problem with the primary can be identified and they are reasonably sure it can be prevented on the backup.
On reflection, 1 in 2500 might even be a little high. It's based on an old estimate (that has held roughly true) that 1 in 50 will suffer catostrophic damage during launch. A lot of the failure scenarios involved in producing that projection involve the loss of the orbiter during the launch phase, in which case a rescue mission would be pointless. Case in point: the Challenger explosion.
Haha! Now that is funny enough I have to respond to it. When I think about it, it actually makes sense for you to call the development of technology designed to reduce collateral deaths "war mongering," because you're also in favor of the deaths of few dedicated, hard-working men and women with families. I'm all for keeping the Tomahawks inside their launch tubes, but if we need them, guiding them precisely with GPS sure beats carpet bombing Baghdad.
Next time, be a man and log in when you troll. The karma threat might make you think a little before you post.
Sometimes the old solutions are best. Instead of terrorists, though, who you definitely can not trust, how about criminals who have a reason to try to make reparations. Offer them a chance to work off their debt to society, the main cost being that (if current trends continue) approximately 1 in 50 will die. I'm talking about shooting them into space to handle all these NASA projects, of course. Society won't necessarily miss them if something goes wrong, but they've got a reason not to deliberately screw it up.
The only problem I see is that ordinary people like me might suddenly decide to rob a bank for the opportunity to go into space.
I can't believe I'm joining a theo discussion on Slashdot
I would contend that it's worthwhile to least worth be respectful simply because He can throw it down on anyone who is rude. I could go further, but that would just make me another close-minded raving Catholic lunatic. Bottom line: if He doesn't exist, the parent comment is irrelevant nonsense. If He does, we're not in the position to call the shots.
Duh! He wasn't digging straight down.
Reminds me of a story my freshmen physics professor told.
When he was young, he got a big magnet from an old radar that had been scrapped. He snuck it into the arcade in his backpack with the intention of manuevering the ball through the extra life gate with it. Unfortunately, when he moved it over the ball, the ball jumped up and smacked the glass with enough force to break it. He had to refine his technique a little bit and pick a different arcade, but it eventually worked.
My understanding is that the costs are primarily the salaries for the members of the mission team still involved in the operations. There is still the business of planning the daily drives and sorting through the spectroscopy data and pictures they receive back. They have also been continuing to develop improved flight software (funny that they still call it flight software when it's on the ground) and just did an update 2-3 weeks ago to improve autonomous driving based on what they've learned so far. That development will be probably be directly applicable to future missions. I suppose there is also some cost related to having antennae dedicate part of their time and bandwidth to receiving the data streams, as well.
The part about political clout was a bunch of crap, probably added in by that Roland guy. The professor was talking about heating fuel, not automotive. He's not talking about driving your car on this, he's talking about heating rural homes, many of which are currently heated by wood, oil, or coal. The idea is to use grass pellets instead of wood pellets in special stoves or furnaces. He's claiming that this can be done more economically than wood pellets.
I'm unaware of any regulations keeping an entreprenuer from starting a business processing pellets and selling them for use in wood pellet stoves and furnaces. Either no one has the guts to make the initial investment, or it's not actually economical. If this is really being used in Europe already, I suspect the former.
I grew up on a farm in western Washington. We get about 150 bales per acre on the first cutting in May. Each bale is 50 pounds, so 7500 pounds. We get about half that on the second cutting in late August. In better growing areas, you can probably get a total of about 15000 pounds per acre for the whole growing season from three cuttings. Total cost including land, equipment, and labor is about $1/bale. You also need about about 6 ft^3 per bale for storage, so 90,000 ft^3 per acre. Pellets can be made more dense (~25 lbs/ft^3 I would estimate), and I suspect that's what the author was talking about. I don't have any energy values for hay or costs for wood pellets, but I figure on Slashdot someone else might find my numbers helpful for comparing the two. I assume he's talking about an alternative to wood pellets for rural heating.
There's a lot of problems with this. First, do you know of any large asteroids made out of platinum orbiting close to the sun? There's some that contain significant amounts, but it's not like you can just grab a one ton chunk and expect it to contain 1 ton of platinum.
Second, contrary to what you see in Armegeddon, asteroid mining techniques are not that advanced yet. By not advanced I mean non-existant. In fact, there's only been just one landing ever on an asteroid, and that actually something more of a low-gravity crash.
Third, we don't have the capability right now to return a one ton payload. Genesis was returning at most a few milligrams, and it ended up making a hole in the ground.
Fourth, the one probe that did land on an asteroid cost $150 million and it was pretty small.
Fifth, $30 million return on each $110 million investment still yields a negative cash flow. I didn't even have to take economics to learn that. You need a 3.5 ton load just to break even (see point 3)
Sixth, if you flood the market, one ton of platinum is no longer going to be worth $30 million (or whatever the current price may be).
Seventh, while SpaceX is doing well so far, they haven't yet launched anything. Furthermore, the most mass they can theoretically get to escape velocity with their bigger rocket is 1.2 tons. You have to fit all your landing gear, mining equipment, and return vehicle in that.
This is the first time an autonomous repair mission has been attempted and $110 million is about what I would expect.