New Mars Forums

Yes, except that I would advocate significant expenditure to develop adequate telepresence technology (i.e., that copes with the up to an hour round trip communications time) so that the operators can be situated on Earth, and later Mars, rather than near the target asteroid.  However, I do appreciate that the high level of automation required for this may not be achievable in the near future.

I think the required thrust perpendicular to the surface is fairly modest for this type of drill - the deep drilling guys use this sort of drill and don't exert much force through the drilling shaft beyond its own weight.  Also, as noted by Tom below, once the shaft is started, you can use tracks or the like to keep burrowing.

Right, you need thrusters to get going.

Two ideas here. 

The first is that the orbiter will be collecting mass so that the added momentum of the ore stream will accelerate it less and less.  If you don't mind that the orbiter is getting further away (it does have to return to Earth at some point after all) then you can just plan for the vector that the ore stream will add.

If that doesn't work, then perhaps it would be again possible to use ejected ore to counter the vector.  I'll assume the orbiter has access to more power than the miner.  If the orbiter can accelerate 1% of the received ore to 100 times the velocity of the ore stream (or 10% of the received or to 10 times the velocity, etc), then it can remain in relative position while still collecting ore.

There is sure to be some loss, but I don't think it'll be 100%.  We can improve on efficiency later, I'm just trying to think of something that is cheap and will get a load of whatever is valuable.  The bag may have to be more of a funnel to a collection point, particularly for volatiles.

Are some really solid metals and not some sort of compound ore?  Wow.  No, I don't think this drill would work for that scenario.  I guess it'd be brittle because of the low temperature.  Maybe you could shatter it first with a shaped explosion directed through a plane some yards below the surface you want to mine.  Hard to automate though.

Probably your best bet would be to blow hot CO over the metal to extract via a carbonyl, but the added complexity is horrible.

You are probably right about the volatiles, but the refining effort isn't too bad because of the free vacuum.

What about using the momentum of ejected ore to keep the drill bit against the asteroid surface?

I'm imagining a drill bit like this ...

only larger, and perhaps more spinning bits around the edge of the torus.  The spinning bits would direct the ore through the center of the torus and then there would be further spinning cylinders (perhaps plastic-coated or the like) inside a tube whose role is to accelerate the ore towards a waiting orbiter.  The ore stream would then be caught in a net or bag and eventually towed back to Earth.  I really don't see onsite refining at first.

Your test page looks great, maxie.

What's the big roadblock?  Technical?  Political?  Economic?  All of the above?

China needs, and has contracted for, the vast majority of Iranian oil.  This is one of the reasons that Iran is being so bold. 

Another is that they believe that they are the chosen people of God.  But then who doesn't believe that?

karov, this is awesome.  I've been thinking about this all week.

I'm reading up on solar dynamics to get a feel for the figures, but here is the basic idea: create a magnetic lens in heliostationary orbit with current running through dusty plasma "coils" maintained by one or more (relatively small) coil generators spinning around the center of the lens.  The center of the lens could simply be the center of gravity of the coil generator swarm, or, the coil generators could be tethered , for example, in pairs.  The diameter of the lens would be tens of thousands of kilometers.  The coil generators not only generate the dusty plasma that constitutes the coils, but also the electric current that (by flowing through the dusty plasma coil) generates the magnetic field that focuses the proton wind.  Once focused, the proton stream is directed into a Venetian counter-orbit to be swepted up by the planet as it moves through its year.

This would be a passive mechanism.  I haven't even begun to think about teasing out additional mass, but that is a great idea as well - perhaps we could create a kind of lighting-rod for coronal mass ejections with high energy EMPs.