Analysis of an asteroid mining architecture utilizing small spacecraft

Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply and availability of many resources vital for human civilization. Recent analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining process economically feasible. Considering possible applications, the importance of mining water in space specifically has become a major focus for near-term options. Most proposed projects for asteroid mining, however, involve spacecraft based on traditional designs resulting in large, monolithic and expensive systems. An alternative approach is presented in this paper, basing the asteroid mining process on multiple small spacecraft, i.e. a de-centralized architecture. Nonetheless, to the best knowledge of the authors, so far limited thorough analysis of the asteroid mining capability of small spacecraft has been conducted. Therefore, this paper explored the lower limit of spacecraft size for asteroid mining operations. This provides the foundation to establish a feasible miniaturized spacecraft design capable of extracting water from asteroids and transporting it to an appropriate orbit for further processing, as is presented in this work.