Speaking of gold. There is an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter named 16 Psyche that scientists believe contains more than 700 quintillion dollars in gold and other precious metals.
It’s not the biggest one in the belt, about 120 miles in diameter (roughly the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego). 16 Psyche is known as an M-type asteroid. In the weird and wonderful jargon of astronomy, “M-type” is short for “metallic type”.
How many metals? Well, at current market prices, 16 Psyche contain enough gold and other precious metals to be worth roughly $700 quintillion, which is enough to give every single human being on this planet a private fortune of nearly a hundred billion bucks.
See picture below.
NASA is sent a mission to 16 Psyche, launched in 2022. It’s studied the asteroid.
Most asteroids are either dirt lumps with a little bit of ice or ice lumps with a little bit of dirt. But 16 Psyche is neither? it’s metal. Astronomers suspect that the asteroid is really the leftover core from a blasted apart planet?
It suffered some horrible catastrophe event. it was theorized that it was part of a destroyed planet. By studying the asteroid, astronomers can gain some precious clues as to the formation of our solar system.
Not surprisingly, all that gold has inspired the creation of several asteroid mining companies. Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company, raised $50 million in funding from 2012 to 2016 and launched two test satellites into orbit before its acquisition by ConsenSys in 2018. AstroForge, another asteroid mining company, has raised $13 million in seed funding in 2022 alone.
Here is the catch If you want to go gold mining on 16 Psyche and gobble some of those quintillions for yourself, I’m afraid you’re not going to get as rich as you think you might?
If you think about it, for starters, the gold is in the asteroid, and the distance between Earth and the Asteroid Belt ranges from 3.2 and 4.2 AU – 478.7 to 628.3 million km or 297.45 to 390.4 million miles away.
You have to have the technology to get there, dig it up, and return big chunks of it back to Earth–something that nobody has ever done before, and the cost might be just too astronomical to be viable.
Also ya much take in consideration, that value of the gold in 16 Psyche is based on the current market value, which is in part due to its relative scarcity. If you were to dump millions of pounds of the good stuff on onto the market, its value of gold just might drop being virtually worthless.
Even so maybe one day when we are long gone and if we have not blown ourselves back to stone age through war. The concept of robotic mining on the moon first then further afield in our solar system might be more common than we imagine.
Science fiction? think again.
Nasa mining rover
Crow