Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA just gave $100K to a company that wants to steer asteroids toward Earth

Dyllan Furness
By

asteroid spacecraft madeinspace
Made in Space
Countries around the world are betting big on asteroid mining. Last year, President Obama approved measures to give companies permission to mine and own resources harvested from outer space.  Back in May, Luxembourg announced the Prospector-X concept spacecraft, which it plans to launch into Earth’s orbit to test resource extracting technologies.

Now, NASA has awarded funding to California-based company Made in Space to develop technology that may see asteroids become self-propelled spaceships, reports Space.com. With the initial $100,000 funding, Made in Space has nine months to prove its system is viable.

Recommended Videos

Made in Space’s end goal is to facilitate asteroid mining projects by bringing the bodies closer to home. Rerouting asteroids towards us puts more resources within our reach, while taking tasks like manufacturing off of Earth may make mining more efficient.

Related

“Today, we have the ability to bring resources from Earth,” Made In Space co-founder and CTO, Jason Dunn, told Space.com. “But when we get to a tipping point where we need the resources in space, then the question becomes, ‘Where do they come from and how do we get them, and how do we deliver them to the location that we need?’ This is a way to do it.”

In its Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automate (RAMA) project, Made in Space will launch high-tech, robotic spacecrafts to land on near-Earth asteroids. These spacecraft, known as “Seed Craft,” would mine parts of the asteroid and use those resources to build primitive propulsion and navigation systems. With these systems in place, the asteroid would then be directed towards Earth, where a single mining station could access its resources more easily.

RAMA is a long term project, which may take as little as two decades to develop and implement, Dunn told Space.com. In that time, other space mining companies may have already begun to mine asteroids but, for Made in Space, the additional efficiency and economic viability afforded by RAMA is worth the wait.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness
Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
NASA team pauses efforts to deploy Lucy spacecraft’s unlatched array
see lucy spacecraft slingshot past earth fly by

NASA's Lucy spacecraft recently made a flyby of Earth, capturing some stunning images of our planet on its way to investigate the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter. But Lucy has had some troubles in the form of a solar array that hasn't fully deployed. Although issues with the array shouldn't prevent the spacecraft from achieving its science goals, the team had hoped to fix the problem. But now, they have had to pause their efforts to get the array into place.

Lucy has two large round solar arrays which collect energy from the sun to power the spacecraft. These arrays were folded up for launch in October 2021, then deployed in a clock-like motion once the spacecraft was in space. One of the two arrays deployed and locked into place as planned, but the second array didn't fully deploy. The array folded out far enough to collect the power needed for the mission. However, because it wasn't fully deployed, it couldn't latch into place, meaning it was not as rigid as it could be.

Read more
NASA asteroid crash left a comet-like trail 6,000 miles long
The trail from the Dimorphos asteroid after NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into it.

As we await news on whether NASA has been successful in changing the course of an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft into it, it's emerged that the collision caused a huge debris trail around 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) long.

A remarkable image captured by the SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) telescope in Chile two days after the September 26 impact shows the trail from the Dimorphos asteroid as a white streak blazing through the blackness of space millions of miles from Earth.

Read more
NASA takes a closer look at DART’s final images before asteroid crash
The Dimorphos asteroid as seen from NASA's DART spacecraft.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a distant asteroid on Monday in a mission designed to see if the force of such an impact can shift a space rock’s direction of travel.

If it worked -- and we may not find out for a couple of months -- then we will have a way of deflecting hazardous asteroids spotted heading toward Earth. And when you consider what happened to the dinosaurs, that would be very good news indeed.

Read more