Off-Earth Mining and Resource Utilisation is of great interest for providing valuable in situ off-Earth resources for the expansion of human activities into space. A primary resource of interest is ice, since ice can be used to provide propellant and oxidiser for spacecraft, avoiding the cost of transporting these from Earth; off-Earth ice mining can have an important bootstrapping function for space exploration and utilisation, beginning with ice from near Earth asteroids and the moon. As in terrestrial mining, Off-Earth Mining must be preceded by prospecting, which is the initial identification of promising mineral deposits on solar system bodies. Extraterrestrial prospecting falls naturally into three phases: discovery (eg of asteroids or likely locations for lunar ice deposits); remote characterisation (by radar, photometry, ground or space-based spectroscopy); and local characterisation, including near fly-bys and landings (allowing for drilling, gravitometry and magnetometry). From this a mineral deposit can be modelled to represent its mineral content as distributed in 3D space.
CITATION: Lindley, C A, Sennersten, C C, Evans, B and Sellers, E, 2019. Resource modelling for mining on the moon, Mars and asteroids, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 181182 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).