12 Easily Retrievable Asteroids Suggested For Moving Near Earth To Mine

Twelve easily retrievable asteroids were named Thursday that could be caught and mined with today’s technology.

According to a report in MIT Technology Review, researchers from the University of Strathclyde in the UK searched a database of 9,000 near-Earth objects looking for especially easy-to-capture asteroids.

To be called an easily retrievable asteroid, the space rock needed to be movable into a safe and stable orbit around the Earth with only a slight adjustment to its velocity.

You can read more of the details at MIT Technology Review. Or you can get the whole paper online here.

Yes, we’re all aware of the safety concerns. Dropping an asteroid onto the Earth’s surface would be a Very Bad Thing.

However, a war between nations over strategic minerals could be a Very Bad Thing too. Scientists point out that asteroids represent a huge source of completely unmined minerals.

Believe it or not, there’s already a company formed called Planetary Resources, which seeks to find a way to exploit the mineral wealth out there in space.

This summer, Planetary Resources actually collected $1.5 million on Kickstarter to launch the world’s first crowdfunded space telescope. When complete, the scope should help sweep the skies for more asteroids.

It has been a busy summer for asteroid science.

In late July, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) released new findings about the asteroid-like objects called centaurs discovered in the belt between Jupiter and Neptune. You can see their artist’s creation of a portion of the so-called centaur belt in the top photo.

JPL researcher James Bauer said that NASA now believes that most centaurs are not true asteroids flung from the inner solar system’s asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Instead, they are mostly comets from the outer solar system.

Considering their location as well as their apparent origin, the centaur objects are anything but easily retrievable asteroids.

[Fabia Crater on Vesta Asteroid Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA]

[Centaur Asteroids Top Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]