This is a very basic set of requirements for an Asteroid Industry R&D mission to a Near Earth Object.

Purpose

To prove that it is possible to extract useful material from an Asteroid.

Name

I've been calling this mission concept either "Asteroid Industry R&D" or "Asteroid Industrial Testbed". Neither of those is very catchy. So I'm on the lookout for a proper name.

Requirements

• Travel from Earth orbit to rendezvous with and land on a Near Earth Object (NEO).
• Once landed, deploy: gatherer, refinery, communications antenna.
• Gather asteroidal material (dust, pebbles, rocks) and place it in the refinery.
• Refine at least one useful material from the collected raw material. Possibilities include: iron, oxygen, silicon, gold, platinum, etc.
• If the refined material is volatile, then some provision needs to be made to store it.
• Empty the refinery, then continue refining material as long as possible.
• If possible, measure the physical and chemical properties of both the raw and refined materials.

Major Subsystems (Cruise Phase)

• Power
• Communications
• Navigation (sensors, calculations and deltaV)
• Heating
• Prep for Landing (stow comm gear, solar panels, etc)
• Computer (includes some responsibility for most other subsystems)

Major Subsystems (Landing Phase)

• Power
• Navigation
• Landing/Docking
• Post Landing: Deployment (Comm, solar panels), contact Earth, etc

Major Subsystems (Operations Phase)

• Power
• Communications
• Deployment: Solar panels/collectors, 'Gather' subsystem, Refinery
• Solar panels/collector. Maybe additional solar (PV) panels and/or a direct solar concentrator for heating
• Gatherer. Gather raw asteroid material. Could be an arm with a scoop or a mobile robot
• Refinery. Solar powered oven, electric/magnetic oven (possibly electrolysis), ion sputterer, heater plus cooling for fractional distillation. Another possibility is Plasma Conversion technology.
• Optional:
  • Camera. optical, infrared, UV, others
  • Spectrograph?

A very tentative timeline not just for this mission but for a larger mission, of which this would be the first small step.

I plan on adding to this document as best I can, including possible destinations, refinery types, and masses. Here's what I have so far:

Miscellaneous Facts

• From Deep Space 1: 45 watts of power for each kilogram of the [solar] array's weight
• Electric Fuel's Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) batteries: 400 Wh/kg. I don't know the details, but I think these may require an atmosphere to work
• Best lithium batteries: 150-200 Wh/kg (from an eWorld story)
• Possible Boronhydride fuel cell: 2200 Wh/liter. Currently 600 Wh/liter.
• Secondary payload on an Ariane 5 can be at least 220kg.
• The following are quoted from Permanent
  • "An asteroid that's only 100 meters wide (as wide as a football field) is about 3 million tons of material. (That's 100 meters wide, long, and tall.)"
  • "...the asteroid 1982DB requires a "delta-v" of 0.1 km/sec. (For comparison, getting off the moon and into Earth orbit requires a delta-v around 2.5 km/sec, and getting off Earth requires a delta-v over 11 km/sec."
  • The Genesis spacecraft: "total propellant used during the entire mission thus far are 17.67 kilograms." "Genesis Vital Statistics: 678 days since launch; 292 days to planned completion of solar particle collection; 449 days to Genesis return to Earth."

Questions and Comments

• Target
  
  • Which NEO should be the target?
  • Choice of target will limit choice of resource to mine/refine.
  • What about choosing three different targets, one each of M, S, C type asteroids? That way any designs (or even hardware) that are common to all three can proceed even before a final destination has been chosen. Better yet, all three could be fully designed, built using as much common hardware as possible.
  • Graph launch date/time versus delta-v for each target. Publically available software to keep this up-to-date and to allow non-Oribtal-Dynamicists to play with different parameters would be good. You would want to be able pick a delta-v and have it show all of the future launch dates that are possible with that delta-v.
  • One possible choice is 2004 MN4 'Apophis'
  • Another is 3554 Amun:

    The long-term possibilities are even more celestial. Ever heard of 3554 Amun? It's a space rock about 2 kilometers in diameter that looks as if it might have fallen straight out of The Little Prince. There are three key things to know about 3554 Amun: First, its orbit crosses that of Earth; second, it's the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroid yet discovered; and finally, it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals. In other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates. And if you time your journey right -- 2020 looks promising -- it's easier to reach than the Moon.

  • A third choice is one of a class of 'co-orbiting' asteroids: 2004 GU9
• Propulsion
  
  • Need the following data on each of these: delta-v versus mass (hardware and feul), cost, reliability.
  • Conventional chemical propulsion.
  • ION engine. Fairly thoroughly tested by Deep Space 1.
  • Solar Sail. Not yet tested.
  • Magnetic Sail. Not yet tested.
• Landing
  
  • Since the target will probably not be mapped sufficiently (other than Eros), the mission will probably need to enter orbit first and do enough mapping (of both resources and topography) to pick a landing site.
  • See the Rosetta Mission for publicly available information on a comet lander mission. Unfortunately it won't be landing before 2014, so final data on its effectiveness won't be available until then.
  • More notes about landing

I've listed some possible follow-on missions.

And some miscellaneous notes.

Comments are welcome. Actually, not only are comments welcome, but I would be delighted if someone else took this ball and ran with it. It's a little out of my range of expertise, and I think it's too important to be handled by an amateur. On the other hand I also think it's too important to not be attempted at all.

References

1. High Performance Solar Sails
2. A site with more/better details than this one.
3. PERMANENT's industrial processes section has lots of great details.
4. Early results from Japan's Hyabusa mission to asteroid Itokawa.

Last Modified: February 9, 2007