Modeling Debris from Asteroid Mining to Inform Legal Frameworks
The first asteroid mining missions may not happen for a decade or more, but government agencies and private companies are steadily working towards making it a reality. As some groups work the engineering and business challenges, others are looking at the scientific and legal challenges. One such challenge is dealing with debris in a microgravity environment.
According to most interpretations of the current domestic legal frameworks adopted by the United States and Luxembourg, citizens may possess and sell space resources. However, there’s currently a gap in addressing the potential unintended consequences from asteroid mining.
A team from the University of British Columbia (Fladeland, Boley, and Byers) modeled the effect of debris generated from hypothetical mining operations on a handful of NEOs. Their goal was to determine whether this debris would pose a near-term risk to Earth satellites in the form of meteoroids. They will present their study and findings at the 1st International Orbital Debris Conference in Sugar Land, TX, USA that will be held December 9-12, 2019.
The impact of such a study highlights the value of regulatory oversight. Meteroids are already a background level threat that could cause a major malfunction or disable a satellite in Earth orbit. As the number of satellites increases, any uncontrollable debris exacerbates the hazard for remaining assets. For perspective, over a third of the $360 billion satellite industry is revenue generated by commercial satellites operators providing vital services such as global telecommunications, weather forecasting, GPS, and much more. There’s a great necessity to prevent a “tragedy of commons” (like making Earth orbit unusable for future generations) while not impeding the commercial development of outer space.
According to co-author Dr. Aaron Boley, “Engaging in this sort of interdisciplinary work is exciting. The translation between different [academic] worlds is sometimes difficult, but if you’re open to learning new things, that sort of struggle can be transformative.”
Any reasonable legal frameworks built to address space activities should be rooted in a firm understanding of science and the physics-driven environment of deep space.
Ejecta Plume On Asteroid Bennu, Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) such as asteroids and comets are very small compared to planets. A small mass means a very low force of gravity. A human could jump off the surface of an asteroid and never fall back down. The 500 meter wide asteroid Bennu, which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been studying for the past year, has an escape velocity of just over 0.5 kilometers per hour. Bennu is essentially a pile of rocks held together by very weak gravity (unsurprisingly known as a “rubble pile” asteroid).
This microgravity environment introduces a lot of challenges to any proximity operations of scientific exploration and resource extraction alike. Within the first few months of arriving at asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx team had observed 11 distinct ejecta events. While this ejecta was naturally occurring, a hypothetical full-scale mining operation on a similar asteroid could kick up much more dust and debris.
This study analyzed how particles of debris from asteroid mining would spread out over 100 years to determine how much, if any, might pose an artificial meteoroid hazard that could disable Earth satellites or space-based infrastructure.
The authors of the study noted:
“In some ways, the results are reassuring, in that the sporadic meteoroid population could be far more significant than any streams produced from asteroid mining, if proper limits are put in place. However, we do not want to dismiss the possibility of secondary effects that could result in large mass expulsions caused by manipulating the asteroid’s surface.”
