My last day of sitting on my duff and eatinbg good food…..but science is once again in my mind…..and as we all know…I love sciencey stuff!

As we know, some of us more than others, that the resources on this planet are very limited and we will do little to see that we have enough for the future because it is more profitable to exploit those resources than to conserve…….but some guys have decided to try anyway…….

A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.

Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity’s exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.

Platinum-group metals — ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum — are found in low concentrations on Earth and can be tough to access, which is why they’re so expensive. In fact, Anderson said, they don’t occur naturally in Earth’s crust, having been deposited on our planet over the eons by asteroid impacts.

And there are a lot of precious metals up there waiting to be mined. A single platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide contains the equivalent of all the platinum-group metals ever mined throughout human history, company officials said.

The company is not ready to break ground on an asteroid just yet. Before that can happen, it needs to do some in-depth prospecting work.

Of the roughly 8,900 known near-Earth asteroids, perhaps 100 or 150 are water-rich and easier to reach than the surface of the moon, Anderson said. Planetary Resources wants to identify and characterize these top targets before it does anything else.

To that end, it has designed a high-performance, low-cost space telescope that Anderson said should launch to low-Earth orbit within the next 18 to 24 months. This telescope will make observations of its own but also serve as a model for future instruments that will journey near promising asteroids and peer at them in great detail.

The prospecting phase should take a couple of years or so, Anderson added.

This is just a cool report…..hopefully I will be around to keep an eye on this for future posts….