What mineral sources exist in space?

Outer Space has extremely rich mineral resources, especially in the form of nickel and iron from iron asteroids. Asteroid 16 Psychie, a wide asteroid 200 km (125 million), which accounts for 1% of the material in the asteroid belt, contains 1.7 x 10

19 kilograms of ore, enough to give the requirement of world production from 2007 for millions of years. A more wet asteroid, just a kilometer, could contain billions of tons of iron ore. For information, the annual world production of iron ore is about a billion tons. There are about 800 billion tons of iron ore sources worldwide, which seems to be a lot, but if consumption continues to grow exponentially, it could be completely dug over a century, requires iron from anywhere. There are sufficient sources in the asteroid belt that have maintained the needs of iron and nickel of our civilization for many years, but the high cost of the universe duration makes their current recovery disproportionately expensive. About asteroids there are other sources in smaller quantities, including most metals with atomic number lower nIron. There are considerable freshwater sources on Jupiter-Family comets, but desalination is likely to be cheaper than in the introduction of an asteroid, even in the long run. There are large Helia-3 sources on the moon surface that could theoretically be used to power fusion reactors.

For asteroid mining, which would be economically feasible, a large robotics would have to be developed, preferably robotics themselves, because the extraction of space would be laborious and somewhat dangerous affair. For minimizing the weight of the material to be started from the ground, heavy uses of in situ resources would be needed. The first asteroid mining would probably appear on asteroids almost countries that are rarer than Their Cousins ​​in the asteroid belt, but large enough to provide serious resources for colonization in early phase and economic exploitation. One possible goal would be4660 NEREUS, 1 km wide asteroid, whose trajectory, with respect to Earth, means that it would require less energy to get there than a month, but the trip would be longer because it is about three times until a month at its closest approach.