Psyche - The 10,000 Quadrillion Dollar Asteroid

If you look at my sources (bottom of post) you will see that there has been a lot of news articles about an asteroid called Psyche that is estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion.

This is because it is believed to be almost entirely made up of iron and nickel along with a high concentration of other valuable elements.

This post is not going to be a repeat of what all those other articles are saying instead I want to think about the ramifications of mining this asteroid.

Background

Psyche has a mean radius of about 110 km (70 miles) and fairly pure nickel-iron composition with a lot of the rest made up of orthopyroxene(this is a mineral that could be composed of magnesium, zinc, manganese, lithium, chromium, aluminum, magnesium, cobalt, manganese, scandium, titanium and vanadium ).

The asteroid has a mass of 2.7 x 10¹⁹ kg so there is a lot of stuff there.

So its basically a treasure trove. Good stuff, let's haul it all back to Earth right?

Well no.

Some Calculations

• The density of iron is 7874 kg/m³.
• The density of nickel is 8908 kg/m³.
• Let's take the average of these two elements to get ~8391 kg/m³.
• The mass of Psyche is 2.7 x 10¹⁹ kg, let's just assume that it is all nickel-iron.
• This means that the volume of nickel-iron will be about 3.2 x 10¹⁵ m³ (3,217,733 km³) if it is all delivered to Earth in a non-porous form.
• The mean radius of Earth is 6371 km so its volume (V = 4/3 π r³) is 1.083206916846x10¹² m³.
• Add in the volume of the iron-nickel from Psyche and we get 1.083210134579x10¹² m³.
• We can solve for the radius of this new Earth-Psyche combination (r = (3V/4π)^1/3 to get a new Earth radius of 6371.0063085 km.
• 6371.0063085 - 6371.0000000 = 0.0063085 km or 6.3 metres.
• This means that we could cover the Earth in about 6 metres (~20 feet) of pure iron-nickel.
• The Earth is 29% land and really only the land could be covered in iron-nickel.

This means that we could cover all the land on Earth with a 21.7 m (71 feet) solid layer of nickel iron! (if I did not make some stupid math error).

Trantor / Coruscant

In closing it looks like we could easily build a world-wide city just using the metal from Psyche.

I don't know where we would put all of the animals though.

In short, Psyche is not worth 10,000 quadrillion dollars because we would never transport that much metal to the surface of the Earth but it might be useful for building a Death Star :)

Or a really tall wall at the Mexican border. One that reaches into space. </sarcasm>

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Post Sources (Best Sources First)

NASA Probe to Psyche: https://www.nasa.gov/psyche
Wikipedia Article on Psyche: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche
Trantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor
Coruscant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coruscant
Various News Articles:
https://www.chron.com/news/science-environment/article/NASA-to-explore-asteroid-made-of-10-000-10860219.php
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2017/01/18/nasa-planning-mission-asteroid-worth-10000-quadrillion/96709250/

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