Astroid with 90 million tons of platinum..
I'm sure that if we had snagged it, the price of platinum would now be somewhere close to the "free for the taking" zone. Maybe next time around....
Dwarf planet Pluto has a "tail", according to the latest information from the New Horizons probe - a plasma tail caused by the solar wind. New Horizons carries a tool called the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument that, as the craft swung behind Pluto last week, was asked to sniff around for signs of charged particles …
I just looked it up and currently worldwide 'production' of platinum is a staggering low, only about 200 tons a year.
Because of its terrestrial rarity, there are few large-scale uses for platinum. It has industrial uses as a chemical catalyst in the reduction of alkenes amongst other things (it's the main 'ingredient' in a car's catalytic converter, which apparently accounts for the largest portion of the global production). As a catalyst, it is not needed in large quantities, and isn't consumed (although catalysts can be 'poisoned' by chemical impurities in the reaction mix, requiring them to be periodically removed and re-purified). It has the 'ooh-shiny' factor associated with rare metals and brightly coloured minerals that makes it valuable for jewellery. There are a handful of other industrial and medical uses (cis-platin is a platinum containing chemotherapy drug).
What effect would a 90 million tonne glut in the worldwide market have? Firstly, it would piss off all those people who thought they were being clever by investing in platinum. A bunch of people would find their expensive wedding rings were suddenly worth no more than something made of base metal, and industry would rejoice. Industrial applications that would previously have been considered impractically expensive could be exploited. University chemistry departments and industrial research outfits could buy the metal in bulk and find new uses for it (it is a very efficient catalyst for a number of processes after all). Platinum-based alloys would become financially practical; these may have interesting chemical or physical properties, such as superconductivity.
> Because of its terrestrial rarity, there are few large-scale uses for platinum. It has industrial uses as a chemical catalyst ...
Also used on posh rabbit hutches. There's the possibly apocryphal story of the plant worker who sheepishly owned up to 'liberating' a sheet of gauze from work for his daugter's rabbit hutch, after he discovered a VERY expensive platinum catalyst had gone missing.
Loyal Commenter,
You forget to mention that Platinum is used as a catalyst in Automobile "catalytic convertors" and in fuel or plastics manufacture..
At the moment it is expensive enough to warrant stealing the converters from under your car for the Pt metal content.
At a 90 million ton glut there would be enough to economically make tractor trailer size catalytic convertors for power plants and refining plants.
Seems to be enough reasons for Elon Musk to get into the asteroid mining business.
If we'd snagged it we'd be finding all sorts of interesting new uses for platinum. The price wouldn't tank entirely, but it might go down by half. Which is fine. Asteroid mining is viable to even a quarter of current prices. You can also control the price of platinum by varying the return rate.
Also: why return it all? Platinum is really useful in space, and that asteroid will have lots of Silicon. Make high-value parts (like highly efficient solar panels) in-situ instead of lifting them from Earth. Platinum helps with all sorts of high-tech gadgets and given the density is kind of expensive to drag out of our gravity well.
Don't know if it's El Reg or somewhere else, but 400x1000m = 400,000m3. Density of platinum is ~21t/m3. So if it was PURE platinum, there might be ~9m tons of it, not 90m. And it's fairly unlikely to be pure. Not looked up any other sources on this, so don't know who's made the mistake.
@Andrew Bolton - you;ve assumed it was 400x1000x1m - if it was 400x400x1000m that's 160,000,000m3. As it's egg-shaped, it's maybe half of that, say roughly 80-100 million cubic metres. Which, if it was water would be about the same number of tons, and rock's about three to five times denser, I think? 90 million tons still seems like a lot, to me, but not utterly unfeasible, I'd've thought.
Oops, yes, my mistake. Too early on a Monday morning.
Density of platinum is 21 times that of water - it's the 3rd densest element. Still talking ~5%/vol of platinum in the rock, which considering the richest deposits on earth are at about 0.5ppm, is quite impressive/doubtful. My scepticism of the calculation still stands :).
According to wikipedia, platinum usage in 2010 was 245 tons. So 90m tons would be 360,000 years reserve.
More to the point, at $1000/oz platinum would be worth ~$36m / ton and in round terms the annual value of platinum used (2010 rate) would be ~ $9 billion. This is not a lot of money to fund the effort needed to bring the stuff back even if you assume that you supply the world demand at current prices. Given that platinum is more or less a waste product from the mining of other bulk metals the cost of terrestrial sourced metal could drop a long way in the face of competition.
I'm not convinced it makes any economic sense to think about mining asteroids like this unless we are there already for something significantly more valuable.
"More to the point, at $1000/oz platinum would be worth ~$36m / ton and in round terms the annual value of platinum used (2010 rate) would be ~ $9 billion"
More to the point, current recovery cost of platinum is about $550/oz, so there's quite a bit of room for the market price to fall.
Only a small %age of platinum is a sidestream product, 75% of it comes from a 3 foot thick igneous layer under northern South Africa, most of the rest is alluvially recovered downstream of the Urals (there's clearly a motherlode somewhere but if it's been located, this is a russian state secret)
Do the reverse of the little nudging rockets proposed to divert in-coming, earth-aimed asteroids: just get one or two to deflect it to a tighter orbit and slowly reel it in, perhaps with another nudger or two. You would have to wait a few years while it circled in and you could finally get it in orbit around earth. The big fun would be cracking it open to scoop out the platinumy goodness within.
We're Jews out in space
We're zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race
We're Jews out in space
If trouble appears
we put it right back in its place
When goyim attack us
We give 'em a smack
we'll slap them right back in the face
We're Jews out in space
We're zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race
Looks like the forum threads have gotten attached to the wrong articles in some cases. There was an article about a vaguely egg-shaped asteroid said to contain rather an extraordinary amount of platinum, to which this thread was linked. I've just looked for the article and couldn't find it. No great loss as it didn't give any details or links to details as to why it was thought to contain so much platinum, which would've made it more interesting.
So, here we all are, stranded on this platinum-rich asteroid. Anyone like a toffee? Hey, what's that shiny blue dot up ahead?
Is Pluto completely spherical. ....
NASA :(( The new range is just west of the region within Pluto’s heart called Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain). The peaks lie some 68 miles (110 kilometers) northwest of Norgay Montes ))
At the same time NASA say" Pluto spherically Despite all those in surface that does not proportion to its size .
"But we don't believe Pluto spherical because NASA wanted it spherical "
Do?????? NASA hide a lot about Pluto's surface details to prove Pluto is spherical to achieve spherical condition of IAU for returning it the ninth planet