NASA Astronaut Michael Hopkins performing an asteroid mining experiment on board the ISS – credit, NASA via Cornell University – released
Last week, GNN reported that fungi were being trailed by scientists in Austria for their potential to extract valuable metals from electronic and industrial wastes.
Now from the ISS comes a very similar story where, rather than ‘mushroom mining,’ scientists were able to extract platinum and palladium with ‘microbe mining.’
It’s actually ‘microbe meteorite mining,’ as the scientist in question, NASA astronaut Michael Scott Hopkins, conducted the tests on L-chondrite meteorite samples which has long been theorized as a valuable source of minerals of all kinds.
All elements we know of are made inside stars, and are embedded inside planets when they explode. This process is the same for asteroids, and at a time when humans are spending more and more time in space, scientists are interested in figuring out how to harvest materials from meteorites and moon dust, as it would likely be cheaper than flying them up from the Earth.
A team of researchers from Cornell and Edinburgh universities recently published a paper in which they performed the same experiment in tandem with Hopkins.’ Both used a bacterium and a fungus to successfully harvest two precious metals with demand for space technology and hardware: platinum and palladium, from asteroids.
The organisms achieve this by producing carboxylic acids which attach themselves to these minerals on the asteroids. Once placed in a liquid solution, the acids slough away and bring the minerals with them.
By comparison to the Cornell experiment, the one aboard the ISS found that microgravity enhanced the fugus Penicillium simplicissimum’s ability to uptake and release palladium and platinum, showing that “bioleaching,” the technical term behind microbe mining, is for one reason or many, more effective in space than on Earth.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: China’s New Moon Rock Samples Contain Beautiful Crystal New to Geology
In direct contrast, nonbiological leaching—in which a solution without microbes is used to pull out the elements—was less effective in microgravity than on Earth.
“Another complex but very interesting result, I think, is the fact that the extraction rate changes a lot depending on the metal that you are considering, and also depending on the microbe and the gravity condition,” Rosa Santomartino, Cornell professor and first author for the study, said in a statement to Cornell Chronicle.
OPERATING LONG-TERM IN SPACE: Lava Tubes and Water Frost Found on Mars Offer Double Opportunity in Search for Life
Several companies are already developing solutions to mine asteroids in space, among which is TransAstra. This firm, which had originally attempted to develop a series of autonomous mining probes, has shifted focus to asteroid mining technologies, including a system for reflecting the light of the Sun to melt and recover valuable elements from asteroids, and a capture bag that can be used to collect passing micrometeorites or space debris for later processing.
SHARE This Impressive Demonstration For A Possible Future In Space…
