• Question: is it possable to mine on the moon

    Asked by to Andrei, Ekbal, Gemma, Helen, Ruth on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ekbal Hussain

      Ekbal Hussain answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Hi Bremnerd,

      That’s a fantastic question and one that has huge implications. I apologise in advance, but this might be a long answer… this is only because it’s a very exciting question!

      Believe it or not, if we wanted to we could actually mine stuff on the moon. We have all the technology needed to do that. Yes, it will be VERY expensive but it’s not impossible.

      The real question is, what would we mine on the moon? We don’t think there is much worth mining there. The rocks are very much the same as the ones on Earth and the few that are worth mining probably won’t be worth the cost of getting all the equipment there.

      However …. there are a lot of businesses and organisations working on trying to mine asteroids. These are large rocks in space and can be anything from a few metres to tens of kilometres big. Yes, it will cost a lot of money (even more than mining on the moon) but the material we could get out of them would make it worth while, things like iron, copper, gold, silver and other precious and valuable metals.

      Actually, the European Space Agency sent off a rocket called Rosetta 10 years ago towards a comet that is now getting closer to our sun. Only a few months ago the rocket woke up from a 10 year sleep and started its engine to catch up with the comet.
      The idea is to land the rocket onto the comet and gather rocks and other samples to bring back to Earth. This is an absolutely amazing thing to do, considering how difficult and how far away the comet is!

      Although this isn’t actual mining, we are gathering samples and maybe one day we could do this on a bigger scale and gather comet dust to use on Earth.

      Wouldn’t that be incredible?! 😀 😀

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