Every few years asteroid mining returns to the headlines as a trillion-dollar gold rush waiting to happen, usually attached to a single staggering number about how much some metal-rich rock is theoretically worth. It is a genuinely exciting idea. It is also one where the economics tend to run in the opposite direction to the pitch.

I am a writer with a long interest in this beat, not an engineer or an economist, so take this as a careful reading of the material rather than expert testimony. The short version is that the case for asteroid mining is real, but almost nothing like the version that gets sold.

The graveyard of the first gold rush

This has been tried before, with serious money behind it. In the 2010s two well-funded companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, set out to mine asteroids and drew backing from high-profile investors.

Neither mined anything. As CNBC reported, both ran short of the money needed to cover enormous development costs and were absorbed by other companies by 2018 and 2019, one of them pivoting to blockchain. The lesson was not that the resources are not there. It was that the timelines are long, the capital required is vast, and investors ran out of patience long before anyone reached an asteroid.

Why the trillion-dollar numbers mislead

The valuations that drive the headlines are the least useful part of the story. The metal asteroid 16 Psyche is often quoted as being worth something like ten quintillion dollars, a figure that dwarfs the entire world economy.

Two things are wrong with reading that as a business plan. The first is that the number assumes you could deliver all that metal to Earth at no cost, when the delivery is the entire problem. The second is more fundamental: if you actually did land that much platinum or gold, you would flood the market and collapse the price of the thing you came to sell. The markets for precious metals are small by weight, and they do not have room to absorb asteroid-scale quantities without the value evaporating.

It is worth adding that NASA’s Psyche mission, now on its way to the asteroid, is not a mining venture at all. It is a science mission to study a metal-rich world, which the agency now estimates is somewhere between 30 and 60 per cent metal. Nobody is going to mine Psyche, and there is no technology that could.

The prize that actually adds up is water

Strip out the gold-rush fantasy and a more sober case remains, and it is not about bringing anything home at all.

The expensive part of anything in space is lifting mass off the Earth against its gravity. A litre of water already in orbit is therefore worth far more than a litre sitting in a reservoir here, because you have not had to pay the enormous cost of launching it. Many asteroids, the dark carbonaceous ones, are thought to hold water ice, and water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel, or used directly for life support.

So the version of asteroid mining that pencils out is not platinum sold on Earth. It is water and simple materials mined in space and used in space, to refuel spacecraft and supply habitats without hauling everything up from the ground. An analysis in the Harvard International Review makes this point plainly: the real economic logic points to servicing activity in orbit and beyond, not to enriching commodity markets back home.

This is a much less glamorous business than a space gold rush, and it is also the only one that currently makes physical sense.

The current attempt

A new generation is trying anyway, with more modest aims. The startup AstroForge is the most visible, and its record so far is a fair snapshot of how hard this is.

Its Odin spacecraft launched in February 2025 to scout a metallic near-Earth asteroid, but the company lost contact with it not long after deployment, ending the mission early. A follow-up probe, Vestri, is intended to actually dock with a small metallic asteroid, which would be a real first for a private spacecraft. It has not happened yet.

The targets, sensibly, are near-Earth asteroids, the ones whose orbits bring them close to us and make them reachable with reasonable amounts of fuel. These are the same objects we track for planetary defence, including ones like Apophis, which will pass close to Earth in 2029. Accessibility, not raw value, is what makes an asteroid worth visiting.

None of this is investment advice, and I have no idea whether any of these companies will succeed. What I can say is that the sober question worth watching is not which rock is worth the most on paper. It is whether anyone can mine water in space and sell it to the next spacecraft, because that, and not a platinum windfall, is the business that would actually change how we operate off the Earth.

The post Asteroid mining gets sold as a trillion-dollar gold rush, but the economics point the other way: hauling platinum back to Earth would crash its price, so the only prize that adds up is mining water and burning it as fuel in space appeared first on Space Daily.

The spots on a leopard, the stripes on a zebra, and the mask on a raccoon are all types of coloration in mammal fur, referred to as pelage. Scientists have struggled for a long time to understand how these colorations evolved. A team of researchers recently discovered how to reconstruct the colors of ancient mammal fur using cell structures that contain the chemical pigment melanin, known as melanosomes. They hope to use this understanding of ancient mammal pelage to determine how they lived and what their environments were like.

To decipher the color of ancient mammal fur, the researchers constructed a statistical computer model to predict their fur colors based on the shape of their melanosomes. First, they needed to understand how the shapes of melanosomes control fur color in modern mammals. To measure the length and width of the modern melanosomes, the scientists used a beam of electrons like a flashlight to map them in great detail, a technique called scanning electron microscopy.

They measured the length and width of 2,615 melanosomes from the fur of 116 different living mammal species, including a Red Panda, a German Shepard, and one or more species of most types in the mammalian classification. Then they recorded the wavelengths of light reflected off each melanosome using a microspectrophotometer. These wavelengths represented the exact color of hair from each melanosome they measured. This means they now had a quantitative measurement of the color of each hair to compare with its corresponding melanosome length and width.

When they examined their data, the researchers found that spherical melanosomes produced brighter fur colors, like reds and oranges, while elongated melanosomes produced darker fur colors, like browns and grays. The researchers plotted the microspectrophotometric measurements for each melanosome as a graph showing how much light it absorbed across each possible wavelength, creating reflectance curves. Based on these data, the researchers used computer software to create a statistical model that could predict reflectance curves, and therefore color, from melanosome shape alone.

Once the researchers created a model, they needed to find fossilized mammal melanosomes to predict their fur color. Mammal fossils are rare, and pieces of cells are only preserved in the most immaculate fossil deposits. In fact, these researchers only found 6 fossils of this caliber, from Mesozoic rocks deposited around 250 million years ago, soon after mammals evolved. 

The fossils came from 2 world-renowned deposits in Northeastern China, the Yanliao and Jehol biotas. They selected 5 previously studied fossils from these locations, including 1 specimen of Megaconus mammaliaformis, 1 specimen of Vilevolodon diplomylos, 2 specimens from the group Docodonta, and 1 specimen from the group Eutheria. All of these animals were small, rodent-like mammals. The researchers also discovered a new species of tree-dwelling mammal, Arboroharamiya fuscus.

The scientists used scanning electron microscopy to measure a total of 2,159 fossilized melanosomes to refine their color predictions. The fossilized melanosomes were all slightly elongated spheres and had far fewer differences in shape than in modern mammals. The researchers used their model to predict reflectance curves based on the shapes of the fossil melanosomes to determine the ancient mammals’ colors. They found that all the extinct mammals they examined likely had dark brown fur without any color patterns.

Based on these findings, the researchers suggested that most, if not all, early mammals were nocturnal, like many dark-colored mammals today. They suggested that this nocturnal lifestyle probably helped them survive the meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 100 million years later. While dinosaurs were unable to survive in the post-impact wasteland, these smaller, dark-colored mammals were more resilient and thrived in the aftermath. As mammals filled the ecological roles left by the dinosaurs, they evolved new color patterns, some based solely on camouflage, and others on new factors, like sexual selection and visual communication.

The researchers concluded that their model can predict fossilized mammal colors and help determine how these ancient animals lived. Notably, their data suggest that mammals likely stayed small and nocturnal throughout the Mesozoic until the dinosaurs were gone. Future researchers could use similar methods to uncover exactly how mammals evolved the colors we see today. For example, studying mammals closer to the impact event could reveal if it took a long time to develop diverse fur patterns, or if they began before the dinosaurs’ demise. Ultimately, similar studies could help determine whether the extinction of dinosaurs was necessary for the rise of mammals.

The post What colors were prehistoric mammals? appeared first on Sciworthy.

Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. But exactly how that impact caused those extinctions has been the subject of fierce debate. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the “Alvarez hypothesis,” after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary(the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. It has been estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

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