Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

ASTRONAUTICS to reach, thus one of the Near-Earth Aster- oids. This is a large group of small mass bod- ies and thus with weak gravitational fields, easy to approach at relative low speeds without having to resort to costly deceler- ation devices. Prospector-1 can obviously only assess the possibility of mining those asteroids. For moving on to a more concrete stage, DSI will have to design, build and send into space real robotic diggers, able to extract mineral ores and transport them to a sort- ing and processing plant, from where they will come out as raw materials to be plac- ed on the market. Processing those raw materials directly in the circumterrestrial space will also allow to build components for spacecrafts, orbit- al stations and lunar bases, and countless other products that would be too expen- sive or even impossi- ble to transport from Earth. For now much of it is still at sci-fi tech level, but if we really want to con- quer space, the first step to make is that announced by Deep Space Industries. pellants in astronautics history. But if the ultimate goal is to create the conditions for colonizing space, water by itself is not suf- ficient, and, in fact, the DSI engineers are also targeting the extraction of other sig- nificant resources, such as nitrogen, phos- phorus, sulphur, ferrous metals, carbon compounds and silicates, just to name a few. Both the water and these additional resources are particularly abundant in C-type asteroids (i.e., carbonaceous), which are the most common variety as they repre- sent about 75% of all those known. Pros- pector-1’s target will be one of them, but in order for the mission to be truly eco- nomical, the choice must fall on one easy n D ata sheet of one of the potential targets of the DSI pro- gram. This is a typical Near-Earth Asteroid with orbit similar to that of our planet and thus relative- ly easy to appro- ach. 2016 HO 3 was discovered on 27 April and it is now the most stable quasi-satel- lite of the Earth. Its year lasts 366 days. [DSI] T his spectac- ular video shows the Pro- spector project and its possible developments. [DSI]