- 2910 - ASTEROID - mining gold from asteroids? “16 Psyche” is an asteroid full of metal in the asteroid belt that could be worth $700 quintillion.. NASA plans to visit 16 Psyche by 2026. Could we be commercial mining faraway asteroids or should we start with the moon?
--------------------------- 2910 - ASTEROID - mining gold from asteroids?
- The idea to go into space and mine 16 Psyche, an asteroid made of gold and other metals like iron and nickel. Flying somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, this amazing space rock is estimated to be worth as much as $700 quintillion, thanks to all the metals it contains.
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- Quintillion is 1 with 18 zeroes. $1,000,000,000,000,000,000. It's such a large amount of money that if you divide it up between everyone alive on Earth currently, each person would get about $93 billion. I’ll take it. That is enough to maybe swing our Presidential election.
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- The prospect of actually getting such a giant chunk of precious metals back to Earth is no small task. 16 Psyche is a truly massive space rock at over 120 miles in diameter. It is one of the largest asteroids flying in the asteroid belt.
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- NASA is planning to send a Discovery Mission to the asteroid in 2022, which will arrive there by 2026.
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- 16 Psyche may just be made almost entirely of an iron-nickel alloy, with small amounts of other metals, likely to include gold. If it really is so full of gold and other riches, the asteroid could actually crash Earth's economy, which at $75.5 trillion is a pittance against the amount of money one could get from the asteroid.
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- The best-producing properties around the world produce only 4 to 5 million ounces of gold that they bring to the market every year.
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- 16 Psyche was actually discovered back in 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, and named after the Greek mythological character Psyche.
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- Besides this giant rock in the asteroid belt, there are other mining opportunities much closer to Earth. Moore points out that while Psyche "may be the Holy Grail of space exploration for gold," near-Earth asteroids are much better first targets for mining.
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- Even our moon might be a better place to start such operations. It also has gold as well as platinum and other rare earth metals. In other nearer goals, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources each plan to mine the 2011 UW158 asteroid, worth up to $5.7 trillion.
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- Morgan Stanley investments projects the global space economy to be already worth $350 billion, which it thinks will grow to trillions by 2040. The race is on between the U.S., China, Japan and even small Luxembourg, which has 10 space-mining companies registered.
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November 18, 2020 2910
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