IAC-17.B4.8.7: Low-cost asteroid mining using small spacecraft

Recent studies suggest that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) supposedly contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining process economically feasible. Considering future applications, the importance of mining water in space has become a major focus. Most proposed projects for asteroid mining, however, involve single spacecraft that are traditionally large and expensive. Recent examples of such concepts, which rely on the capturing capacity of the spacecraft are the Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) and the Asteroid Provided in-situ Supplies (APIS) project. As an alternative approach, asteroid mining could be based on multiple small spacecraft, another emerging trend in the space sector, which could enable a higher degree in reliability and a potentially lower cost of operation and a smaller chance of single point failures. Nonetheless, limited analysis on the asteroid mining capability of small spacecraft was conducted so far. The project explored the possibility to perform asteroid mining operation with small spacecraft. An overview of the different approaches is provided, analyzing the current architectures and technologies. This analysis provides the foundation to establish a feasible design for a spacecraft capable of extracting water from asteroids and transport it to an appropriate orbit for further processing.