Priming the pump for lunar PGM mining

by Bill White
Monday, October 24, 2005

Dennis Wingo’s bookMoonrush should be mandatory reading for space enthusiasts. Although his hypothesis concerning the presence of lunar platinum group metals (PGMs) remains unproven, his hypothesis is also eminently testable—all we need do is go look, something NASA presumably intends to do, eventually at least. Jeff Foust’s review of Moonrush (see “Review: Moonrush”, The Space Review, August 16, 2004) contains a nice summary of the Wingo hypothesis:

The Moon […] would seem to be an unlikely place to find PGMs: the collisional process that formed from the Moon left it mostly devoid of heavy metals. However, Wingo makes an ingenious case for finding PGMs on or near the lunar surface, in the form of debris from asteroid impacts. While conventional wisdom has argued that impacts of large asteroids would vaporize most of the impactor, modern computer modeling has shown that a significant fraction of an asteroid impacting the Earth would survive in some form. In fact, some major sources of PGMs on Earth, such as Sudbury in Canada and sites in South Africa, have been linked to asteroid impacts. The Moon’s lower gravity would mean slower impacts, making it more likely that significant portions of asteroids could survive. PGMs mined from those impacts could meet the fuel-cell needs of the Earth for centuries; the mining process would, in turn, also generate other metals like iron and nickel that could be used for settlements on the Moon and beyond.

More at: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/479/1