3 types of million dollars asteroids

Asteroids (Image courtesy from NASA)

The vast majority of asteroids orbit the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In this belt, you could find millions of smaller asteroids and almost 2 million asteroids with 1 km of diameters. These natural matters are abundant, and surprisingly have materials that contain metals. Yap, asteroid contains metals such as iron, platinum and many more. For instance, the Argentinian craters and meteorites contain lots of iron, and imagine if we could mine the meteorites? What could we have?
In the young Solar System, some asteroids grew so large and hot that gravity attracted heavy metals to their cores under a mantle of rock. Now, many have been crushed into pure rock and metal fragments, and one type in particular is attractive to mining companies. What are those types of asteroids that can be a source of mining? Here the 3 asteroids!

Metal-Type (M-Type) Asteroids: Mining companies prefer metal asteroids. They are former cores, so they consist of pure/ precious metals such as platinum, gold, and silver, or base metals such as iron. Metal asteroids are very compact much more than the rock types that are sometimes found on Earth. The mining company Planetary Resources has identified a metal asteroid estimated to contain more platinum than has ever been mined on the Earth.

Rocky Type (S-Type) Asteroids: Rocky asteroids hold no guarantees. Like Earth’s mountains, rocky asteroids may contain valuable metals, but mining companies cannot be sure to find rich ore. Because of this, rocky asteroids are the least attractive objects to the diggers of space, although they often orbit quite close to Earth. These rocky asteroids used to be the mantle around an asteroid core and may contain metals.

Icy Type (C-Type) Asteroids: These asteroids contain lots of water (frozen into ice), and by using solar panels, the water can be converted into oxygen and hydrogen to be used as propellant. So, mining companies hope to use these asteroids as “filling stations” to create spacecraft fuel and top up the reserves of extended mining missions. These building blocks of the Solar System exist in no-converted asteroids made of carbon, phosphorus and many more.

There are many types of metals contained inside the asteroids, for instance, lanthanum; neodymium, and yttrium. Neodymium makes the world’s most powerful permanent magnets and is used to make efficient wind turbines, speakers and more. Other rare-earth metals, which are used in electronics or even in green technologies such as electric cars, could be abundant in certain asteroids.