Asteroid Mining: Stepping Stones to Solar System Exploration

Since its inception, NASA has promoted a vision of space exploration that involves missions and outposts within the inner solar system with supplies delivered from Earth's surface, the Moon, or Mars. Recent research suggests an additional scenario in which humans live in space supported by resources extracted from asteroids, beginning with the most accessible Near Earth Objects (NEOs). NEOs are a cost-effective approach because they contain available, exploitable extraterrestrial resources that are delivered to the inner solar system by gravitational perturbations from the planets, they have been naturally preprocessed into objects the ideal size for industrial operations, and they contain critical materials for cost-effective self-sustaining activities in space.

Speaker: Robert Jedicke, University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy