On 5 Dec 2009 at 11:33, allen carpenter wrote:
> I hate to say this, but mining, as a profession at least, has never
> been shown any love in travellers. As in, how to use sensors to
> locate Ore, determining Ore quality, Quantity of Ore, difficulty of
> extraction and how in Handwavium hell does a laser mine anyway
> besides makin a hole in whatever your trying to dig out anyway? For
> example, Chemistry would be invaluable in determiniing ore quality,
> Geology would be useful in finding likely spots to find Ore, and how
> big a Lode is found. Sensors use also, neutrino sensors for
> radiactives and densitometers for Heavy Metals. (on a side note, how
> useful are lower tech sensors at finding ore? thermal sensors might
> be useful if the ore deposits are close to the surface and have
> measurable thermal variances from surrounding terrain. Active sensors
> such as millimetric radar can penetrate surface layers of 'earth',
> but to what depth?)
Well, mining on a planet is way different than mining asteroids. For
one thing, there isn't any ore on asteroids. While they are somewhat
differentiated, you need a planet sized mass (and likely, water) to
produce ore bodies.
So if you are mining asteroids, you have icy bodies (if you are far
enough from the star), carbonaceus chondrites (what icy bodies turn
into if they spend a lot of time closer to the star), stoby asteroids
and nickel iron asteroids.
You can also get a mix, but thatis going into more detail than I want
to right now.
> The only way I have figured, in my limited technical knowledge, that
> a mining laser could be useful in zero gravity, is if it works purely
> in a thermal function, melting materials at a known temperature,
> allowing heat expansion to separate elements over time (and at a
> considerable distance! to avoid contact with molten materials) Then
> wait for the materials to cool before collecting and storing in the
> ore bay.
You can use the laser to convert the material to a plasma and use EM
fields to sort the atoms (basically an overgrown mass spectrometer)
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com