Planetary Resources

Vintage illustration of mining an asteroid. Artist unknown

Ever since a mysterious press conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight was announced last week the web has been crawling with rumors of asteroid mining. Those rumors were confirmed today as the conference revealed the initial details of the project. It was announced that the company Planetary Resources is “starting the Silicon Valley of space up here in Seattle.” Considering that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is already headquartered here, with Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, part of Google and an entire class of small tech companies, Seattle is the place to be. I certainly am happy to have grown up in such a prestigious city; but it just means that my unemployment prospects are augmented by the fact that I’m competing with PhD’s for entry level work.

Planetary Resources was founded by space entrepenuers Eric Anderson and Dr. Peter Diamandis. Advisors include director James Cameron and a host of highly qualified scientists, astronauts, and business leaders. Larry Page of Google is a lead investor as well. Diamandis knows all about building credibility for space venture, he started the X Prize foundation with the ambition of human space flight as a target. This of course lead to Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and the birth of Virgin Galactic. With such a star studded line up of individuals, the chances for the startup being successful can be treated much more optimistically.

The first segment of the project will be a fleet of small space telescopes to prospect for such asteroids. This is exciting because it means there will be an industrial push to create a large set of science grade instruments in low earth orbit. I am curious as to what type of configuration such a telescope would have. I am assuming that a fair number of these will have a spectroscopic component so that element abundances can be determined. Radio dishes can be used to map asteroid shapes using sophisticated radar techniques. I am curious to know what spectral components will be studied, obviously hydrogen is going to be of critical importance.

Friends of mine in school had a project to hunt for asteroids using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which is a multi-university owned observation project. The SDSS is outdated however, but the successor project, the Large Synoptic Space Telescope (LSST) is going to really put all other surveys to shame. It is going to use an 8.4 m mirror and a three-billion pixel camera to photograph the entire night sky on a weekly basis. With such a high aperture, taking images so regularly, the LSST will find TONS of Near Earth Asteroids. The expected completion date of the LSST project is approximately four years from now.

Sunset over SDSS in 2008

Ultimately, the LSST would outperform a fleet of small commercial space telescopes in terms of asteroid discovery. but this leads to a small problem. The LSST is partially funded by the US government and by investments from Bill Gates. The Planetary Resources is funded by an entirely different set of spenders, namely Sergei Brin of Google. Whether a commercial space program should be able to exploit data from a public science forum becomes a circumstance of legality and corporate politics. With the SDSS, data remained private for a year but public thereafter. But in the case of NEO’s, time is a very sensitive matter. To rendevous with an asteroid would mean catching it when its orbit brings it near Earth, the launch window would be small. P.R. would need access to the LSST data as it came in. I doubt that this arrangement is slated to happen anytime soon, which might be why they intend to build the fleet of space telescopes. Plus, the key advantage of having your own telescope means not having to fight over usage time. So even if survey projects like the LSST share data with a commercial enterprise (maybe in exchange for payment), P.R. would still need dedicated telescopes to perform follow up observations to acquire spectral information and precise orbital parameters.

I am excited to see what events unfold with Planetary Resources, their industrial scale space telescope project is exciting enough. I just love Peter Diamandis’s outlook, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”

I can’t find any footage from the conference today, so for now just watch the youtube video release they’ve provided.

http://www.iontom.com/2012/04/24/planetary-resources/ http://www.iontom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/10cl.0341-300x207.jpg Featured Home, Front Page, Science, Space Travel, Transhumanism, Uncategorized, asteroid, asteroid mining, mining, planetary resources, space, space resources