Japanese Asteriod Samples That Could Lead To Space Gold Rush (#GotBitcoin?)

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 may finally kick-start the asteroid mining era. Japanese Asteriod Samples That Could Lead To Space Gold Rush (#GotBitcoin?)

The turn of the decade saw a huge surge of interest in asteroid mining, but now this would-be industry has flopped. Can a tiny Japanese probe revive it?

Peter Schiff Says Gold Mined From An Asteroid Is ‘Complete Bs’ Spread By Bitcoin Bulls To Pump Up Crypto

According to the market guru, it is possible that there could be mining of asteroids in the future, but not in our lifetime. “This is all about the future, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years in the future before this would be going on,” said the analyst.

Schiff, who is known for having predicted the 2008 financial crash, said the whole golden asteroid story is being spread to pump up the price of bitcoin.

“It’s just BS, it’s not a scientific or economic story, and it’s just nonsense,” he said, adding: “It is being floated by the bitcoin community to try to create the false narrative that gold supply is not scarce so the price of gold is going to crash and that people should own bitcoin instead of gold because bitcoin is more scarce, because you’ll never find any bitcoin on the asteroid.”

The trending story about the golden asteroid Psyche 16 that allegedly contains massive amounts of precious heavy metals is a “whole bunch of nonsense,” says Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital.

In an exclusive interview with RT, Schiff said that while there is a metallic asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, no one could know for sure what metals it contains.

“It is a rare metallic asteroid with a composition similar to the Earth’s core. It’s made almost entirely of an iron-nickel alloy, with small amounts of other metals, likely to include gold.”

He continued: “But I mean maybe there’s no gold there, we don’t know. They don’t have any idea, they don’t know that there’s gold on that asteroid. There could be some gold there but it would cost a fortune to mine it there.”

Schiff noted that mining most gold on Earth is too expensive, so the cost of sending miners to the asteroid and mining there would be “prohibitively expensive.”

“It would [take] a couple of years for the miners just to get to the asteroid, it’s further than the Sun, it’s a very far trip,” he said ironically.

NASA reportedly plans a mission to Psyche 16 with the launch scheduled in early 2022. After buzzing Mars in 2023, the spacecraft is expected to arrive at the asteroid in 2026.

THE space-age gold rush is dead. Long live the space-age gold rush. On 22 February, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft will touch down on the asteroid Ryugu and start taking samples that it will eventually return to Earth.

Japanese Asteriod Samples That Could Lead To Space Gold Rush (#GotBitcoin?)

The Hayabusa 2 Space Probe After Landing On The Ryugu Asteroid, In This Handout Image Released By Japan’s Space Agency. The Picture Was Taken By Its ONC-W1 Camera.

The probe will fire a bullet at Ryugu and collect dust thrown up by the impact. Later this year, sampling will get more extreme: Hayabusa 2 will use explosives to blast a large lump of copper into the surface. This will create an artificial crater and reveal the asteroid’s insides.

A Japanese spacecraft has successfully touched down on a speeding asteroid 300 million kilometres from the Earth as it attempts an audacious manoeuvre to collect samples and bring them back for scientists to study.

The Hayabusa 2 probe touched down on the asteroid Ryugu at around 11:30pm GMT on Thursday. Data from the probe showed changes in speed and direction, indicating it had reached the asteroid’s surface, according to officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

A live webcast of the control room showed dozens of JAXA staff members nervously monitoring data ahead of the touchdown before exploding into applause after receiving a signal from Hayabusa2 that it had landed.

“We made a successful touchdown, including firing a bullet” into the Ryugu asteroid, Yuichi Tsuda, Hayabusa 2 project manager, told reporters.

“We made the ideal touchdown in the best conditions,” he said.

JAXA spokeswoman Chisato Ikuta said the control centre had “received data that shows that the probe is working normally and is healthy.”

Scientists are continuing to gather and analyse data from the probe, she said.

The probe was due to fire a bullet at the Ryugu asteroid, to stir up surface matter, which it will then collect for analysis back on Earth. The asteroid is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water from some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was born.

The complicated procedure took less time than expected and appeared to go without a hitch, said Hayabusa 2 mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa.

“I’m really relieved now. It felt very long until the moment the touchdown happened,” he said.

He said the firing of the bullet – the first of three planned in this mission – “will lead to a leap, or new discoveries, in planetary science.”

The spacecraft is seeking to gather 10g of the dislodged debris with an instrument named the Sampler Horn that hangs from its underbelly.

Whatever material is collected by the spacecraft will be stored onboard until Hayabusa 2 reaches its landing site in Woomera, South Australia, in 2020 after a journey of more than three billion miles.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency published live updates of the landing on Thursday night, and spirits were high.

In footage broadcast from the control room, presenters repeatedly described the smiles on the faces of team members. When Doppler data came through showing “behaviour as expected” after the spacecraft landed, the official Twitter account for the mission reported “cheers went up with a clap!”

But there was no rest for the team, with the Hayabusa 2 account tweeting: “A group photograph was taken in the control room. Now everyone is back to work again.”

Hayabusa 2 caught up with Ryugu in June last year after a three-and-a-half-year journey to intercept it. Mission controllers at the Japanese space agency had planned to touch down in October, but delayed the attempt after cameras revealed the surface to be far rockier than expected.

The asteroid belongs to a family of space rocks that are the most primitive building blocks of the solar system. “This is the material that didn’t get swept up into planets, it got left behind,” said John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester. “The reason we want to study it is that this is what material was like at year zero.”

Similar material falls to Earth as meteorites, but it is battered and burned as it tears through the atmosphere and quickly becomes contaminated when it thumps into the ground. The asteroid material from Hayabusa 2 will show scientists what meteorite material is like before it plunges to Earth.

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