Futuristic Mining Methods

[Paladin]

Belt Strike has gotten me thinking about mining methods of the future. I've been disappointed in the lack of creativity of sci-fi authors for methods of extracting ore/minerals en masse/with greater speed (not knocking Belt Strike specificly).

Surely, there has to be a better way than generic drilling/digging. When the gold rush in the US occurred all sorts of methods were used to strip gold from the earth in great speed like hydraulic mining. With the reduced concern for environmental safety in an asteroid field and lack of concern for preserving the "natural habitat" around the mines, what could one do to improve/accelerate the process?
Obliterate and pick up debris via flybys?
Massive ore chewing ships?
surface blasting "washing away" the surface slowly?
Slicing them into segements of lower depth to scan more effectively and keep the relevant items?

 

[Maedhros]

How about vaporizing large Ni-Fe asteroids, capturing the resulting metal vapor in a magnetic field then feeding it into a gigantic mass spectrometer to separate the Pt and Ir?

 

[kristof65]

First thing that comes to mind to me is a form of high tech strip mining. Mount huge shredders on the outside of the ship, then slice the asteroid into chunks that fit into the shredder using lasers. From there, move the shredded pieces to smaller shredders, until you get the material into the size you want to sort it at. Then sort and smelt.

I do see two reasons to use more "conventional" mining methods like tunnelling - one is when you want use the left over "shell" of the asteroid as a ship or habitat, the other is for elements that might be more desirable to recover "whole" than risk damaging or losing some via a strip mining method.

 

[EDG]

Some things to remember about asteroids:

1) They're mostly very fragile. What looks like a solid asteroid may actually just be a big rubble pile with dust around the outside. This should be readily apparent if you're there doing stuff to the asteroid.

2) They're usually covered with a LOT of dust.

3) The gravity is so close to zero as to be almost non-existent - that's going to considerably complicate things. Disturb the dust and it'll go flying everywhere and not come down for a lot time (if it even does at all). Blast the rocks and they'll go flying out at high velocity.

4) They're very massive. Even a 10x10x10 m nickel-iron 'asteroid" is going to have a mass of about 33,500 kilograms (33.5 metric tons).

I'd suspect that the metallic asteroids are going to be most economical to mine - because they're literally big lumps of metal (again though, probably with dust over the top). You could get away with heating those up with solar mirrors to melt them, but it'll take some time for the surface heating to penetrate to the interior - especially if it's a big asteroid. And rocky asteroids would be even worse for this because the thermal conductivity of rock is terrible.

 

[GypsyComet]

If the purpose for mining an asteroid is specific exotic minerals, then slower methods will be called for.

If its the raw elements you want, bag and burn. Turn the rock itself into its own smelter. Use Repulsors or nets to keep it all contained and just skim the melt for what you want.

 

[Dave Chase]

Assuming gravity control is possible you just need to park next to (on) the asteroid. Turn on the gravity to the outside of the ship or at set locations (not a tractor but more like a gravity vaccum cleaner) and take the dust aboard and run it through a sifter machine (incase of any valuable material exists.
Then you can bag it, compress it or turn it into blocks. These collections can then either be released or taken and sold to some processing plant.

The mined chunks from the asteriod can be treated the same way.

Another way, (and one of my favorites if you can afford the space) is to have a large enough cargo hold to take in the asteroid. Then you can control the seperate particles as they are created. IF you have gravity control, turn it on at 0.1 G or such to make the loose particles seperate from the asteriod. If you have a big enough ship you just intake the asteroid and process it complete and when full return to base or market.

Another way, which leaves trails is to have small maneuver drives that you attach to the asteriod along with some control system and then take the asteriod to a refining point and process it there. (something that I use in one system where they actually herd the asteroids together and use another system that 'eats' the trails and processes those seperately.

Dave Chase

 

[Klaus Kipling]

What happens to all the residue? It probably won't be a good idea to be releasing clouds of gravel all over the place.

It could be blocked into more manageble chunks, but how big, how many? Will they all need beacons.

It will only take a few decades of large scale ore processing to create a big mess, if not managed.

Maybe a handy gravity well, like a planet like Mercury, would be a decent place to dump all the left over chunks, and keep it out of the shipping lanes, or whatever.

 

[Dave Chase]

What happens to all the residue? It probably won't be a good idea to be releasing clouds of gravel all over the place.

I hear that the rings of Saturn were used as a dumping ground

It could be blocked into more manageble chunks, but how big, how many? Will they all need beacons.

Castles in the sky.
Go bowling for blocks.

It will only take a few decades of large scale ore processing to create a big mess, if not managed.

Really, hadn't notice. The smog you know. LOL

Maybe a handy gravity well, like a planet like Mercury, would be a decent place to dump all the left over chunks, and keep it out of the shipping lanes, or whatever.

Maybe dumping over Venus would settle that planet down some.

Dave Chase
(humor and some truth in the above. Mainly humor)

 

[Vile]

As someone mentioned already, a lot depends on whether you want to 'deconstruct' the entire asteroid, or you are just looking to extract the most valuable minerals. Given that opening up the unimaginably vast resources any star system for exploitation, miners probably won't be too fussy about getting every last bit of goodness out of an asteroid. Metallic asteroids would thus be the targets of choice, and cutting-and-smelting would be the normal practice. Waste handling would depend on local law level and population - if no-one enforces it, miners will not clean up after themselves.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to create a more enlightened or frugal-by-necessity society (such as a belt system with no habitable planets), thise loose rockpiles might be handy sources for total reduction. Small piles which can be swallowed whole would be preferred by processing ships. Waste would be minimal, and could probably be turned into construction material for asteroid bases.

If you want to think big, I remember a thread by Mickazoid on another board which proposed large, modular 'starfish' mining bases which clamped themselves around asteroids and slowly took them apart.

 

[simonh]

I'd use large concave mirrors many kilometres across to melt the asteroid first. The melted blob could then be divided into even sized blobs using gravitics. each blob is then fed to a gravitic chamber that 'compresses' it from all sides so that the densest material such as metals are pushed into the core (the blobs aren't big enough for this to happen naturally at an acceptable rate).

The resulting spheres contain concentric layers of material of increasing density towards the core. These are left to cool and then the material scrubbed off in layers which are then passed on for further separation and processing.

Not all these processes needs to occur at the same site, but it'd probably want to melt the debris at source to create even sized spheres for easy transport. The melting process would also congeal all the dust so that you have nice orderly material for easy transport.

Simon Hibbs