Space miners seek riches in nearby asteroids

A team of venture capitalists and explorers backed by film director James Cameron, billionaire Ross Perot and Google chief executive Larry Page is proposing to bring asteroid mining closer to reality.

Scientists are, of course, keen to see samples in their labs. Of particular interest, says Humberto Campins, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and a member of the OSIRIS-REx team, would be samples from asteroids known as carbonaceous chondrites. Wilcox agrees. Carbonaceous chondrites, he notes, are rich in water, ammonia and other volatile products that don’t normally survive passage through Earth’s atmosphere in meteorites. They are “the native material out of which the planets formed”, he says.

Nature recently wrote an article titled “Space miners seek riches in nearby asteroids” and featured Physics Professor Dr. Humberto Campins. Read the entire article here.