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Cover author: Michał Kałużny http://astrofotografia.pl/

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Psyche asteroid is worth $10,000-quadrillion, and NASA wants to mine it (www.earth.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Psyche asteroid, a celestial object laden with precious metals and valued at an astounding $10,000 quadrillion.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The 3 years it'll take the Psyche mission to get out there is probably why AstroForge is looking at mining near-Earth asteroids. They're estimating under 2 years for a round trip.

As far as that valuation goes, I'll defer to AstroForge again. They're only planning on each spacecraft bringing back about $100 million worth of platinum group metals at a time. That helps to not crash the market.

Psyche could really come in handy for getting those metals to Mars, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Glad more research into asteroid mining is being done, the benefits it can bring to civilization are massive. Also wonder what we could learn about asteroids from Psyche.

Although, what are you even supposed to do with $10,000 quadrillion dollars? Buy an entire continent? Things will get interesting once asteroid mining becomes available to the private sector as well.