The maximum distance for asteroid mining 3 million miles (0.03 AU) with current technology. The corresponding delta-V is 437 meters per second. The near earth asteroids that are in range should contain more than one million liters of water. Swarms of smaller spacecraft to perform mining is more likely to result in an economically feasible …
Since the year 2000, the array of microphones for detecting nuclear bomb detonation has detected 26 nuclear-sized explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere which have been caused by asteroid impacts. Those impacts have ranged from 1 kiloton to 600 kilotons. Danica was elected President of B612 Foundation in 2017 and leads the organization’s global efforts to …
Planetary Resources CEO Chris Lewicki said that Planetary Resources made a risky and aggressive choice in 2017 to double down on asteroid exploration but they are now in trouble because a funding round failed. Planetary Resources had to cut staff and all research and development. They had to stop operations of a successful satellite tech …
The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA will each send a mission to the same binary asteroid to test if they can impact it alter its orbit. In 2022, a NASA mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will collide with Didymoon when the system will come 11 million kilometers close to Earth. The DART …
CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna—an icy minor planet that circles the sun at a distance of nearly 8 billion miles. Scientists have struggled to explain why Sedna and a handful of other bodies at that …
A delay in funding from February 2018 forced Planetary Resources to lay off some of its 70 employees. Planetary Resources had planned on using several small spacecraft, launched as secondary payloads in 2020, fly to near-Earth asteroids to measure their water content. The funding issue will delay that mission. Planetary Resources is reconsidering its reliance …
Researchers at Delft University of Technology are designing a multi-generation interstellar asteroid starship. Next month the DSTART team will present the first version of their starship-scale MELiSSA computer simulation at the AgroSpace-MELiSSA workshop in Rome. The simulation allows the team to test the robustness of the MELiSSA system as it travels through deep space across …
Martin Elvis at Harvard University describes how the SpaceX Heavy allows us to reach over 40% of the asteroids where before we could reach 3%. This is because the SpaceX Heavy allows higher speeds (delta-V aka change in velocity) to be reached. An orbitally refueled SpaceX BFR will allow the upper stage Big Falcon Spaceships …
Elon Musk tweeted that the Third burn successful (for the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy). Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. pic.twitter.com/bKhRN73WHF — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2018 Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought …
Andy Weir who wrote the Martian has now written about a future lunar city in his new book Artemis. Weir started with a basic question: Why would anybody go to the trouble of building a town on the moon in the first place. To him it had only one workable answer: tourism Weir assumes that …
Since the 1990s, the Colorado School of Mines has been a leading institution for the study of space resources and in situ resource utilization (ISRU). It has also become a destination for space scientists and engineers, government agencies, aerospace companies, entrepreneurs, the mining and minerals industry, financial and legal experts, and policy makers to discuss …