Is Asteroid Mining Feasible? Exploring Impact Sites on the Moon

There are those who envision big bucks pouring in from the heavens by cashing in on resource-rich asteroids. In increasing number, probes are being dispatched by multiple countries that can plumb the depths of deliverables from space rocks.

Metallic asteroids are made up mostly of iron and nickel, and also contain platinum group metals, or PGMs for short. Similarly, carbonaceous asteroids are known to contain hydrated minerals.

Tantalizing tastes of asteroids have already been robotically sent back to Earth, by missions such as NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer), which delivered pieces of the space rock Bennu in September 2023.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft is set to arrive at its target asteroid, Psyche, in August 2029. Psyche is thought to sport a metal core that some space miners value at many trillions of dollars.

Then there's NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive in August 2029 at its target asteroid, Psyche — an object perhaps made of a mixture of rock and metal, with metal composing 30% to 60% of its volume.

Enter the entrepreneurial work of AstroForge, a company based in Huntington Beach, California. AstroForge sees mining asteroids as the next trillion-dollar industry and is fully engaged in trying to make space mining a real, \"pick-action ready\" business.

\"Welcome to the school of Hard Rocks,\" said AstroForge CEO and co-founder Matt Gialich, as the company presses forward on a follow-on asteroid mission, Vestri, in 2026.

AstroForge is a deep-space mining company with the goal of extracting valuable metals from asteroids, starting with PGMs.

Mining asteroids versus mining the moon was recently discussed by Alex Ellery, a research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research was detailed at the Space Resources Roundtable, held here last month at the Colorado School of Mines.

According to a recent paper led by Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, it may be more advantageous, and therefore more lucrative, to mine asteroids that have impacted the moon rather than the ones that are zipping through space.

Meanwhile, the prospect that asteroid orbits may be deliberately changed for research and mining, or in the future, by habitation, has gained the attention of a student team from Imperial College London, the University of Santiago de Compostela and Cairo University.

The PAOA idea won the Schweickart Prize, a program of the B612 Foundation. The Schweickart Prize is an annual award designed to foster a new generation of leaders in planetary defense and to encourage ideas to help protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts.

The proposal \"highlights the increasing likelihood of human space activities — including asteroid mining, scientific research missions, and even spacecraft malfunctions — inadvertently altering the orbits of near-Earth objects,\" notes the B612 Foundation.