Expensive asteroid found

[Darren_Garrison]

@Dewey_Finn

Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years from now, when people are establishing off-world colonies (or possibly building interstellar manned spacecraft), we’ll want to locate and capture this asteroid as a source of raw materials

No reason to make any special effort for this one. Another stupid aspect of this story is that most asteroids are enriched in trace elements relative to the Earth’s crust. There is literally nothing about Psyche that makes it any more valuable per unit volume than hundreds of thousands of other asteroids.

The practicalities of mining asteroids

For many of the elements that are rare on Earth’s surface, those geological processes that concentrated them concentrated them down to the Earth’s core. In a differentiated asteroid, those same elements would be concentrated into the asteroid’s core. Luckily, most of the asteroids large enough to have differentiated into a core and mantle/crust have been blasted to bits and those pieces of core are floating around naked. According to this chart the average concentration of gold in the Earth’…