Are there any articles stating that NASA is in fact mining (or at least checking) to see if there is gold on other planets, specifically Mars, since that’s the only one we’ve landed machines on that search for rock and other life?
Why would NASA do such a thing? Gold is pretty useless - its only value is that which we put on it (ooh, shiny!). It’d make more sense to mine for useful metals, like iron or copper. But even these couldn’t be mined and brought back to earth economically.
Actually gold does have several other properties that make it useful commercially, and its higer cost would make it far more likely to be cost effectively extracted elsewhere if even remotely feasible.
Actually, gold is far from useless. It’s used in lots of circuitry. Not to mention, it’s a few hundred dollars an ounce back here on earth.
OK, I knew that. It’s used for plating electrical contacts due to its excellent conductivity, for instance. But 99% or more of the gold that’s been mined here on Earth is sitting in bank vaults doing absolutely nothing. There’s no shortage. We don’t need to get it from Mars for its objective uses.
If you’re planning to make and use the cicuitry there on Mars (and that’s not a bad idea, if it can be implemented), then it’s worth finding, if you’re planning to bring it back to Earth, the cost (including the cost of setting up as well as the energy cost of lifting it out of Mars’ gravity) is going to make it uneconomical. Better to spend the money and energy looking for gold back at home.
This is true, but are they doing it?
…and I don’t think this is one of those situations where time will ease the economics sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It would require an unimaginable shortage of gold on Earth before it ever became worthwhile mining it off-planet.
I should say probably not.
I would say certainly not. Only a handful of probes have visited Mars; as far as I know, none has returned (they weren’t designed to come back, just to radio back data from the surface). The idea that NASA is receiving regular shipments of Martian gold is the stuff of conspiracy theories, not reality.
Indeed. I get the impression that diggleblop is inviting us to prove a negative.
You are correct, sir.
Somehow, I don’t think a lack of gold is one of the more pressing issues our planet faces today. It would also be orders of magnatude more expensive than regular mining to go just as far as the Moon to get gold, even if it were made of solid gold, instead of green cheese.
Sending something to the Moon is an enormous undertaking, it takes a HUGE amount of fuel and you’ll get back only a few hundred pounds of cargo. Let’s say you can bring back 225kg of solid gold (about 1/4 ton) @ $20,000/kg, that’s $4.5 million. That kind of money won’t get you out of the atmosphere, much less to another planet and back.
Mars is far far more expensive to get to than the Moon, and much harder to launch off of, since it’s so much larger.
digglebop, I worked alongside NASA scientists and engineers for three years. If they want gold, they just put it in their budget, because gold is cheap compared to things like focal plane arrays and super-specialized space-hardened computer chips. We had several components on the satellite that we built that were more expensive than gold or diamonds by mass, once you realized that hundreds of thousands of labor hours were required to make a batch, and that of the batch, only two or three would be perfect (that is, spaceworthy).
Another thing about NASA’s scientists is that they wouldn’t ever mine for gold on another planet, because mining gold wouldn’t prove anything – that is, there’s no scientific value in mining for it. They might sample the surface to detect trace amounts (like the amount of gold someone wearing a ring might leave behind after holding a subway pole), but the economics of bringing it back don’t make any sense. To get something into earth orbit you’re paying hundreds or thousands of dollars an ounce, depending on how high the orbit is. To get anything from another planet back to earth, you need to send out about ten times its mass to the far planet, and almost all of that mass needs to be rocket fuel.
So, to bring back ten kilograms of gold, you’d need to put a 100-kg payload on its way to Mars. Let’s say you get a cut-rate contract with the Russians and put this payload (this one-of-a-kind interplanetary return vehicle which you’ve developed for free) on the surface of Mars. It manages to land on a Martian gold mine, and using its massless gold mining tools, it recovers 10kg of gold. Then it flies back to earth with 10kg of gold. It arrives back home six years after you launched it, and gold is worth about $400 an ounce. You’ve just spent millions of dollars on a Russian launch vehicle and gotten back $141,000 worth of gold. Also, you were paying the Russians up front for their launch vehicle, because they don’t launch on spec. Note that I have not included the starts-with-a-B billions you spent flight-testing and developing your one-of-a-kind Martian Mining Droid and Return Craft. The MMDRC will probably cost $4 billion.
On any project designed to mine gold on other planets, there will be at least twenty people who make more than $141,000/yr, and you’re going to have to spend more than a year to develop any kind of space hardware.
So, in short: no. We are not mining gold on other planets. NASA has plenty of better ways to go broke.
You should know better.
Let’s try this a different way: If you look at this NASA website, it contains lots of very readable information about past and future Mars missions. The closest thing that comes to mining for gold is the missions titled “sample returns,” and even in that says that any rock/soil samples taken from Mars must return in a capsule wieghing but “a few kilograms.”
And as others have said, just use common sense: bringing back gold from Mars makes about as much economic sense as sending a probe to the sun to bring back helium so our children don’t run out of balloons.
Mining it? No. But LOOKING for it? Yes. They are looking for all elements, minerals, and chemicals that can tell us about Mars’s geology and history.
Even if you found pure lumps of gold just sitting on the surface of Mars, it wouldn’t be cost-effective to bring it back with today’s technology. But that’s a moot point since, as far as I know, there’s no reason to suspect there’s any more gold there than on earth.
I’ve only seen two types of space mining that’s been seriously considered. One is mining for helium-3 on the moon. Helium-3 is used for nuclear fusion, and much more plentiful on the moon than on earth. The problem is, we don’t have any fusion reactors.
The other idea is to mine asterois, comets and other planets for materials for use in space. It takes a lot of energy to launch water and metals from the earth; it’s much easier to bring it from an asteroid. Of course we run into the same problem: we don’t have any factories in space to use the material.
Not so. Its conductivity is not the primary reason it’s used to plate electrical contacts, it is its resistance to corrosion. As a conductor, gold is up there to be sure (it’s way better than iron or lead, for instance), but it’s still not as good as silver or copper. However, silver and copper both oxidize very readily, which quickly renders electrical contacts useless. Gold is one of the so-called noble metals; it does not oxidize so its surface stays shiny and conductive.
They’re likely doing it here on Earth too. It doesn’t make economic sense to mine for gold on Mars, but if the satellite spectrometers are advanced enough to spot elements on Mars, god knows what stock piles they’ll find on Earth… if spectrometers can even spot gold. Unsure of that.