If the initial mission is successful and one or more useful materials are refined, then it makes sense to consider a follow-up mission to actually put that material to some use. Possible follow-on missions are very dependent on what material is refined, so possible missions will be listed under a particular resource.
These features would probably be common to most or all follow-on missions.
Construct a new (larger) radio dish for the communications system. The comm system would have to be designed from the beginning so that it would be relatively easy to replace the dish, or move the electronics to the new dish.
A more ambitious idea is to send all of the low mass parts for building a completely new
radio dish, which could then be used for radio astronomy.
Build a large scale magnetic solar wind trap. From SpaceWeather.com, the solar wind consists 1.8 protons/cm3 travelling at a speed of 554.5 km/s. At some point I will try to calculate how large of a magnetic field we would need to produce in order to trap a useful amount of hydrogen.
I could be way off, but my rough calculations show something like 1.4x10-6g of hydrogen per square kilometer per day. Not looking very useful, I'm afraid.
Building a space elevator on Earth pushes material science to the very limits of what seems to be physically possible. It should be much easier to do on an asteroid, and would provide some great benefits.
We would need to manufacture a sufficiently strong cable out of asteroidal iron, then get it into place. If the mass of the cable is too great for the lander to launch in one piece, possibly the cruise phase could be used as a temporary anchor so the cable could be built in pieces small enough for the lander to launch.
Especially on the lower mass asteroids it may be possible, and even easier, to simply build a tower from the ground up using steel rods. In the long run this may not be very efficient, since a tower needs compressive strength, while the finished space elevator mostly needs tensile, but once in place it should be easy to modify it.
The composition of the asteroid may make anchoring a space elevator cable difficult, but it should at least be possible to wrap cables all the way around the asteroid and anchor to them.
If the space elevator were made long enough, it might be possible to use it to sling payloads back to Earth. The cruise phase could dock with the elevator, take on cargo, then be released on a trajectory toward Earth. Its job would be minor course corrections and any final orbit shaping around Earth. Until Earth has a space elevator, the cruise phase would still need to refuel and return itself to the asteroid.
The lander's only job would be to carry fuel up to the cruise phase which would then transport it back to Earth. This would require a fuel depot to be built or placed in Earth orbit, in addition to the other mission elements. I would think that most volatiles could be used in a solar thermal rocket. Water could be split (possibly by extra solar panels included in the follow-on mission) and used in a Hydrogen/Oxygen rocket, but that would require automated storage of cryogenic materials.
This is more of a long term idea, possibly using material left over from the refinement of iron or volatiles.
If one of the other materials is intended for shipment to Earth (scientific samples, or possibly for sale as collectibles), heat shields could be manufactured out of refractory asteroidal material and used for an aerobraking capture into Earth orbit, reducing fuel needs for the return journey.
It may also be useful to ship multiple heat shields back in one package, with one being used to capture into Earth orbit, and the others being used for other planetary missions. Or multiple shields could be aerobraked into, say Mars orbit, then used for Mars to Earth return missions.
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Last Modified: June 12, 2006