Asteroid Mining by 'Planetary Resources' Options

[Mongo]

Are Ross Perot Jr. and Google's Founders Launching a New Asteroid Mining Operation?
edit -- fixed link
On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources will announce its existence at the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. It's not clear what the firm does, but its roster of backers incudes Google cofounders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, former Microsoftie (and space philanthropist) Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.
According to the company's press release (below):
[...] the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 18, 2012
*** Media Alert *** Media Alert *** Media Alert ***
Space Exploration Company to Expand Earth's Resource Base
WHAT: Join visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.; leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson; former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki; and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, Ph.D. on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in Seattle, or via webcast, as they unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity.
Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.
The news conference will be held at the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT and available online via webcast.
WHEN: Tuesday, April 24
10:30 a.m. PDT
WHO: Charles Simonyi, Ph.D., Space Tourist, Planetary Resources, Inc. Investor
Eric Anderson, Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.
Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.
Chris Lewicki, President & Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc.
Tom Jones, Ph.D., Planetary Scientist, Veteran NASA Astronaut & Planetary Resources, Inc. Advisor
WHERE: Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at The Museum of Flight
9404 East Marginal Way South
Seattle, WA 98108
Event will also be streamed online.

[Mongo]

I very much doubt that PRI intends to return the entire asteroid to Earth -- for one thing, the energy costs alone would be enormous. They may or may not transport the asteroid to high lunar orbit, but in my non-expert opinion, the most cost-effective route would be to process the asteroid in situ using the abundant solar power to heat the material. A light-weight parabolic mirror could concentrate solar radiation into a solar furnace, with the focus capable of reaching almost the temperature of the surface of the sun, enough to vaporize any material.

One approach would be something like fractional vaporization, with the pulverized asteroidal material being brought to successively higher temperatures. The less refractory material, including all the bound volatiles, would be boiled off at the start, with successively higher boiling-point materials vaporizing as the temperature increases. If the sunlight is concentrated along a straight line, with increasing temperatures along its length, the metal vapor that is released at the boiling points of each of the metals that it would be worthwhile to transport back to Earth (the PGMs and Gold) could be collected by vapour deposition. The fact that this would be done in a vacuum should make this relatively easy.

Of course this process would be horribly inefficient of energy, but once the mirror is deployed, it's all free of charge. There's plenty of available energy there, it just needs to be collected.

Some numbers:

Element / Boiling Point / Concentration * / Current Spot Price per Troy Ounce / Current Value of Element in 1 Million Tonne Iron asteroid (~50m diameter)

Au / 3129K / 0.6 ppm / $1,642 / $31.678 million
Pd / 3236K / 1.2 ppm / $662 / $25.543 million
Rh / 3968K / 8.6 ppm / $1,385 / $382.990 million
Pt / 4098K / 63.8 ppm / $1,552 / $3183.846 million
Ru / 4423K / 45.9 ppm / $115 / $169.727 million
Ir / 4701K / 31.0 ppm / $1,085 / $1081.511 million
Os / 5285K / 31.3 ppm / $380 / $382.444 million
Re / 5869K / 2.4 ppm / $143 / $11.035 million

Each ppm equals one tonne of the metal in a 1 million tonne asteroid.

The total value at current spot prices would be $5269.774 million, and the mass would be just under 185 tonnes, much easier to transport to Earth than 1 million tonnes! Of course the prices would be a lot lower with these quantities of PGMs available -- which would be all to the good in my opinion, these metals are very useful in various applications, but are heavily limited by their cost.

Of course other metals might be valuable enough to refine and transport to Earth as well. For example, pure Germanium metal is currently selling for $1275/Kg, so that would be another $44.625 million from a million-tonne 98 % Fe asteroid, and a whopping $1300 million from an LL Chondrite asteroid of the same mass. There may be other metals that would be worth extracting as well.

* The Role of Near-Earth Asteroids in Long-Term Platinum Supply



Where "98th % Fe" means that the results are for the 98th percentile iron meteorite, ranked by PGM content.

Actually, even an ordinary Chondritic asteroid (much more common) massing 1 million tonnes has about half the value** in PGMs and Gold of the rarer high-end Iron asteroid (plus as I said above, $1300 million worth of Germanium). So maybe just about ANY Iron or Chondritic asteroid would do!

** The reason being that on Earth, almost all the PGMs, being almost inert chemically, sank to the earth's core during its differentiation, so the Earth's crust is heavily depleted compared to the undifferentiated Chondritic asteroids, much less the PGM-enhanced iron cores of the differentiated but now disrupted asteroids.