
Curiosity Mars Rover Checks Odd-Looking Iron Meteorite - okket
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6667
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curtis
This isn't the first meteorite that Curiosity has encountered.

From [http://io9.gizmodo.com/curiosity-rover-finds-a-huge-metal-
me...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/curiosity-rover-finds-a-huge-metal-
meteorite-1605676538):

 _... It 's an iron meteorite, similar to ones found in years past by
Curiosity's forerunners Spirit and Opportunity, but is considerably larger
than any of the ones the MER rovers came across… in fact, at 2 meters (6.5
feet) wide this may very well be the biggest meteorite ever discovered on
Mars!_

I am seriously wondering what the density of meteoritic material on the
surface of Mars is. I am also seriously wondering if it might be an
economically recoverable resource. Instead of launching an asteroid mining
mission, you could land on Mars, drive your rover around picking up nickel-
iron meteorites on the surface, and load them up on your rocket and return
them to Earth.

Now of course you need more delta-v than an asteroid mission, but on the other
hand we already know where Mars is, and unlike many asteroid mining candidates
it has a relatively friendly orbit: no wild inclination, not outrageously
elliptical, and somewhat frequent (and very regular) conjunctions with Earth.

The extra 5000 m/s of delta-v to return anything to Earth is certainly
significant, but since you can use in situ propellant production it's not
nearly so bad as it sounds.

And we already want to go to Mars anyway.

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ChuckMcM
You really don't want to go all the way to Mars for nickel or iron :-). Now if
chunks of platinum, gold, silver, and palladium are laying about to be picked
up, well that is a different story. 100kg of that stuff my be worth 3 - 5
million $ when you got it back here.

On the plus side, if you don't need to smelt iron ore to get metallic iron you
can build stuff on Mars without first building a massive processing plant.
(steel mills are smaller than iron smelters in my experience)

~~~
wyager
> 100kg of that stuff my be worth 3 - 5 million $

That might not be enough to break even.

The asymptotics work out _much_ better with Asteroid mining.

~~~
13of40
Curiosity cost $2.5 billion. Round it up to 3 since it's a round trip. You'll
have to bring back 200,000 pounds of platinum to break even. That's like 3 or
4 Sherman tanks.

~~~
cloudwalking
It will get cheaper as we get more reusable launch vehicles!

~~~
lsaferite
Resource prices will also drop in response to a larger supply. That's what I
was taught once upon a time. Now of course you have the likes of Goldman Sachs
manipulating prices by stockpiling resources to lower supply.

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fairpx
It would be really cool to see more hackers work on ways to improve outer-
world-internet, so we could follow live streams of these space based events in
real time (instead of watch gamers yell at their screen, live)

~~~
mturmon
The light time is a fundamental driver here. See more at
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet)

~~~
noselasd
I think most people wouldn't be very upset if the constant HD stream from a
Mars rover is 5-15 minutes delayed.

The real issue is the cost, bandwidth and infrastructure in place to make that
happen. Scientists would rather want to use bandwidth, power, launch mass and
real-estate on the rovers for science instruments - orbiters around Mars which
relays data must be upgraded to handle more bandwidth, the DSN on Earth that
receives the data can't be dedicated fulltime to one data stream, etc.

(That said, the new laser communication systems NASA is experimenting is
pretty awesome, and will greatly improve bandwidth for space missions)

~~~
7952
As I understand it the satellites used as relays are in quite low orbits which
limit the amount of time available for rovers to upload. A communication
satellite in areosynchronous orbit or at a lagrange point could give more
upload time. But presumably that would require more capable transmitters on
the rover.

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sulam
I'm curious about the final section of the article which refers to anomalous
neutron readings. Two obvious possibilities are that the failure mode is
producing bad data or that there is water somewhere unexpected. Does anyone
know more?

