ASTEROIDS Questions To Reduce Begins
As The Earth's non-renewable resources are fast depleting, scientists and researchers backed b companies and big industries are looking at never before explored avenues - even the deep space - to lay their hands on untapped precious resources. In fact, tapping of precious resources like water and other resources like nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum, etc. in deep space may form the backbone of future human settlement of space.
This exciting concept of mining resources in deep space has been gaining ground for quite some time. People have been eyeing precious water in the form of billions of tons of water ice on the poles of the moon and other precious resources that our Earth's only satellite holds. Private players like Shackleton Energy have plans to extract the water on Moon and turn it into rocket fuel and to create fuel stations in Earth's orbit. It aims at putting a team on the Moon within eight years, provides millions of tonnes of fuel and water and lay the foundations for space settlement because sourcing water is the first step towards creating a human civilization in space.
Now, mining on asteroids which are near our piles of earth orbit and are known as Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) is no longer in the realms of science fiction - the quest to make it a reality has already begun. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spacecraft Osiris-Rex is already on its way to a 2000-feet wide asteroid named Bennu to find out if it's viable for extracting water and minerals.
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| MINING ASTEROIDS - GRAPHIC IMAGE SOURCES BY (NASA) |
