MELBOURNE, Australia -- Professor Bill Zealey doesn't have the cash or resources of NASA in his quest to mine near-earth asteroids for ice. But he does have a couple of things going for him: a US$50,000 grant from the US Foundation for International Non-Governmental Development of Space (FINDS) and a 10-year-old blender.
Zealey, Dr. Mark Sonter, and the rest of their team at the University of Wollongong's Department of Engineering Physics, plan to create a "reasonably realistic design" for an asteroid drill that could one day allow spacecraft to use the hydrogen in water for fuel.
"Currently, getting water from the ground to space is expensive," Zealey said. "It's $10,000 a kilogram."
Here's where the blender comes in: Zealey has recreated what he believes to be the core of ice-based asteroids -- often thought to be dead comets -- that pass near the Earth. It's a cocktail of dry ice, water ice, and clay, deep-frozen then mixed in the dilapidated blender he bought a decade ago for $40.
The drill design, still in the earliest stages, will likely include a penetrator, with a thermal tip and explosive functionality, that can bore, melt, and blast through "giant frozen mudballs." It will also include a "cold finger" that will sit at the surface and collect steam created by the penetrator.
The project is part of a larger scheme coordinated by FINDS, an organization with a $26 million pool used to fund non-governmental space-related research.
FINDS executive officer Rick Tumlinson, who is also founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, has given grants to organizations around the world that are studying whether the elements thought to exist in asteroids can be mined.
In addition to the University of Wollongong, recipients include Dr. John Lewis of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab, which received a $75,000 grant to investigate asteroidal iron extraction.
Once the projects are complete, Tumlinson hopes to combine them and create a "cornucopia machine" that will process all asteroidal resources. "I'm thinking of something about the size of a fridge," said Tumlinson. "You pour your stuff in one end and jars full of oxygen, hydrogen, iron come out the other."
Dr. Wendell Mendell, a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, said the investigations overlook the fact that no one has ever landed on an asteroid before, let alone drilled into one.
"You can draw plausible cartoons of how you would do it, but would those cartoons make an honest-to-god machine with any kind of reasonable efficiency? Your guess is as good as mine," Mendell said.
"When you get there, you might find out that your simplistic assumptions of what an asteroid is made of are wrong," he added.
Consider the enigmatic asteroid 253 Mathilde. According to density readings by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, the asteroid is made of ice. But spectrometer readings made by telescopes indicate there is no water at all in the asteroid.
"If you base your mining company on something like Mathilde, which seems to be convenient to get to [to] mine water, you might get there with all the wrong equipment," Mendell said.
In February 2000, the NEAR mission will intercept asteroid 433 Eros and study it for a year. Wendell says this is the type of investigation needed before mining research can be effective. "We need to learn more about exactly what asteroids are," he said.
"Dr. Mendell is not incorrect," said Tumlinson, "but we can't afford a space mission, so we've got to work on the stuff we can work on. Hopefully, some of the private firms looking into this can use the technology."
Zealey believes his designs will be influenced by future asteroid missions such as NEAR. "There needs to be a mission to an asteroid to check out if we've got some of the right things," he said.
While Mendell may not agree with the logistics of the research, he is still pleased to see it happening. "It's really nice to have some totally independent group with a different mindset working on a project not blessed as 'OK' by our space agencies," he said.
"It's not going to be my retirement project," said Zealey. "but it's exciting because these are the first projects like this people are putting money into." Zealey's real passion for the research lies in getting his students excited about learning. "They do turn the kids on, these planetary projects."
