Why is an asteroid worth $ 10,000,000,000,000,000,000?

Asteroid 16 Psyche, which a NASA spacecraft is expected to visit in 2026, is a massive object about 140 miles (226 kilometers) in diameter. It orbits about 235 million to 309 million miles (378 million to 497 million kilometers) from the sun. Unlike most asteroids, which are made of rock or ice, Psyche is believed to be composed mainly of iron and nickel, just like the Earth’s core.

The composition of the asteroid also makes it, at least in theory, almost unfathomably valuable. Its estimated value is $ 10,000 quadrillion, or $ 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s far more than the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of $ 86 trillion of all the nations on Earth combined (that number comes from the World Economic Forum).

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But how do you actually rate an asteroid? Linda Elkins-Tanton, the principal investigator of the Psyche mission, says in an email that she developed the estimate of $ 10,000 quadrillion in 2017, using the price of materials in the asteroid on the metals market. But that price is really a way to understand the unusual nature of the asteroid, rather than an incentive for future space mining entrepreneurs.

“The key thing, of course, is that the estimate is meaningless in every way,” explains Elkins-Tanton, who is a foundation professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, where he is CEO. and co-chair of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative.

“First, we have absolutely no technology available to bring Psyche back to Earth. And even if we did, the abundance of her metal would instantly make the metals worthless in the markets. But still, it was a fun exercise!”

Additionally, Elkins-Tanton states that the best current measurements of the asteroid’s density indicate that it is not pure metal, but instead has cracks and pore space and more rock in the mix.

“We assume that the metal in Psyche is iron and nickel, as this is the composition of all the metallic meteorites that have fallen to Earth, and that is what we think the core of the Earth is made of,” he says.

He provided a graph, showing that iron accounts for 94 percent of the mass of an average metallic meteorite, which typically also contains about 5 percent nickel, plus smaller amounts of gallium, iridium, tungsten, cobalt, gold, copper, rhenium, platinum and other trace elements.

But he says it’s important to point out that scientists still don’t know for sure what Psyche 16 is made of.

“We’ll find out what it’s really about when we get there,” he says.