Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

ASTRONAUTICS California. It is pre- cisely DSI that re- cently announced plans for the first commercial inter- planetary mining mission, to be im- p l e m e n t e d through its Pros- pector program. This program will consist of two au- tomatic missions: Prospector-X and Prospector-1. The first will be an experimental mission, with the launch in 2017 of a low-Earth orbit satellite, whose task will be to test the key systems and technologies needed to build a low-cost but high-performance inter- planetary spacecraft, namely Prospector-1, which according to DSI’s plans will be ready for launch by 2020. The Prospector-1 mis- sion will be essentially exploratory as, in fact, it will have to reach a suitably chosen asteroid, approach it close enough to be having profit as their main goal, began to seriously reconsider the possibility of min- ing asteroids. Among the companies most committed in undertaking such activity there is the American Deep Space Indu- stries (DSI), operating in partnership with the government of Luxembourg in the re- sources and space technologies field, from its base at the NASA Ames Research Park in I n the side im- age, we can see the Prospector-X spacecraft, which will be the fore- runner of Pros- pector-1, the first interplanetary robotic miner. Below, a graphic representation showing the posi- tion of the scien- tific instruments of Prospector-1. [DSI]