Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2018

7 ASTRONAUTICS at the European Plane- tary Science Congress 2017 in Riga (Latvia) by JL Galache (formerly at the Minor Planet Cen- ter, Harvard-Smithson- ian Center for Astro- physics, now Chief Technology Officer of Aten Engineering and a Deep Space Indus- tries adviser) and first author Amara Graps (University of Bath, UK). The document deals with a series of arguments that point out the need to deepen the study of the properties of NEAs as an ini- tial step towards the realization of the first successful mining missions. Out of a total of over 750,000 identified asteroids, those that transit close to the Earth (less than 1.3 AU) number only about 17,000. Of all these, we only know the orbits with enough precision of a smaller number. With approximation, we only know some of the chemical-physical properties of a few dozen of all NEAs. This scarcity of informa- tion is due largely to two factors. The first is related to the purpose of the surveys dedi- cated to the discovery of potentially haz- tackle the issue is recent, dating back only to September 2016, when dozens of scien- tists, technicians and entrepreneurs met in Luxembourg to outline the guidelines for what could be the beginning of the mining of NEAs. In particular, this group high- lighted the main gaps in scientific and tech- nical knowledge that need to be filled before pursuing NEA mining further. The meeting, “Asteroid Science Intersec- tions with In-Space Mine Engineering (ASIME) 2016,” produced a white paper en- titled “Answers to Questions from the As- teroid Miners,” presented in September 2017 Brandon Hahn - ArtStation