Abstract
Asteroid mining and redirection are two trends that both can utilize lasers, one to drill and cut, the other to ablate and move. Yet little is known about what happens when a laser is used to process the types of materials we typically expect to find on most asteroids. To shed light on laser processing of asteroid material, we used a 300-W, pulsed Ytterbium fiber laser on samples of olivine, pyroxene, and serpentine, and studied the process with a high-speed camera and illumination laser at 10 000 frames per second. We also measure the sizes of the resulting holes using X-ray micro-tomography to find the pulse parameters which remove the largest amount of material using the least amount of energy. We find that at these power densities, all three minerals will melt and chaotically throw off spatter. Short, low-power pulses can efficiently produce thin, deep holes, and long, high-power pulses are more energy efficient at removing the most amount of material.
Highlights
Asteroid mining has the potential to be a very profitable industry [1]
Remote analysis methods like X-ray spectroscopy have been spaceproven by the Dawn mission [6], their findings have some ambiguity that should be resolved by in-situ verification
The first part concerns the characterization of the samples, which include images to show the overall characteristics of the samples
Summary
Asteroid mining has the potential to be a very profitable industry [1]. Sourcing nickel–iron family metals from asteroids has gained interest since 1977 [2], and it was shown to be as economically competitive as extracting the metals from the Moon [3]. A summary of some landing/anchoring and sampling tech nologies with advantages and disadvantages is given in [7] One solution to these challenges would be to use a laser to drill beneath the surface. Because there are no moving parts, it produces negligible countertorques, and will not get stuck It has the advantage of being able to function on a diverse range of targets, from dust to solid metal; see Section 8 of [8] for publications related to various materials. They could even be used without having to land: a diffraction-limited Nd:YAG laser (wavelength 1070 nm) with a 34-cm aperture can make a 1-mm spot at a distance of 1 km
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