Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

ASTRONAUTICS ed from the mining point of view. In addressing the util- ity of the program, this is what Grant Bonin, chief en- gineer at Deep Space Indu- stries, said: “DSI’s Prospec- tor missions will usher in a new era of low cost space exploration. DSI is develop- ing Prospector-1 both for its own asteroid mining am- bitions, as well as to bring an extremely low-cost, yet high-performance explora- tion capability to the mar- ket” . There is no doubt that one of the strengths of the Prospector platform will the ability to minimize costs and maximize results, thus sup- porting the growing space economy; a sector that is today worth more than $330 billion and that in the last fif- teen years has seen dozens of private com- panies investing more than $13 billion in it. For DSI, minimizing costs does not mean compromising on technological innova- tions; on the contrary, it is precisely through them that the company's managers are planning to reach their goals. One example of this is the Comet-1 electrothermal thrust- able to map its surface and subsurface lay- ers up to about 1 meter deep, detect the water content and photograph its surface in the visible and infrared spectrum. After this first approach, Prospector-1 will use its thrusters to get sufficiently close to the asteroid to hook up to its surface, to then start analyzing its geophysical and mineral- ogical properties to establish whether that particular object can be profitably exploit- T he illustra- tions on this page show the approach of Prospector-1 to its target and the subsequent transfer of an as- teroid fragment to the processing plant. [DSI]