After a journey of seven years and nearly 4 billion miles, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed gently within the Utah desert on the morning of Sept. 24, 2023, with a precious payload. The spacecraft brought back a sample from the asteroid Bennu.
Roughly half a pound of fabric collected from the 85 million-ton asteroid (77.6 billion kg) will help scientists learn in regards to the formation of the solar system, including whether asteroids like Bennu include the chemical ingredients for all times.
NASA’s mission was budgeted at US$800 million and can find yourself costing around $1.16 billion for slightly below 9 ounces of sample (255 g). But is that this the costliest material known? Not even close.
I’m a professor of astronomy. I exploit Moon and Mars rocks in my teaching and have a modest collection of meteorites. I marvel on the undeniable fact that I can hold in my hand something that’s billions of years old from billions of miles away.
The associated fee of sample return
A handful of asteroid works out to $132 million per ounce, or $4.7 million per gram. That’s about 70,000 times the price of gold, which has been within the range of $1,800 to $2,000 per ounce ($60 to $70 per gram) for the past few years.
The primary extraterrestrial material returned to Earth got here from the Apollo program. Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions brought back 842 kilos (382 kg) of lunar samples.
The total price tag for the Apollo program, adjusted for inflation, was $257 billion. These Moon rocks were a relative bargain at $19 million per ounce ($674 thousand per gram), and naturally Apollo had additional value in demonstrating technologies for human spaceflight.
NASA is planning to bring samples back from Mars within the early 2030s to see if any contain traces of ancient life. The Mars Sample Return mission goals to return 30 sample tubes with a total weight of a pound (450 g). The Perseverance rover has already cached 10 of those samples.
Nevertheless, costs have grown since the mission is complex, involving multiple robots and spacecraft. Bringing back the samples could run $11 billion, putting their cost at $690 million per ounce ($24 million per gram), five times the unit cost of the Bennu samples.
Some space rocks are free
Some space rocks cost nothing. Almost 50 tons of free samples from the solar system rain down on the Earth on daily basis. Most burn up within the atmosphere, but in the event that they reach the bottom they’re called meteorites, and most of those come from asteroids.
Meteorites can get costly because it could actually be difficult to acknowledge and retrieve them. Rocks all look similar unless you’re a geology expert.
Most meteorites are stony, called chondrites, and so they will be bought online for as little as $15 per ounce (50 cents per gram). Chondrites differ from normal rocks in containing round grains called chondrules that formed as molten droplets in space on the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
Iron meteorites are distinguished by a dark crust, brought on by melting of the surface as they arrive through the atmosphere, and an internal pattern of long metallic crystals. They cost $50 per ounce ($1.77 per gram) and even higher. Pallasites are stony-iron meteorites laced with the mineral olivine. When cut and polished, they’ve a translucent yellow-green color and may cost over $1,000 per ounce ($35 per gram).
Greater than a couple of meteorites have reached us from the Moon and Mars. Near 600 have been recognized as coming from the Moon, and the most important, weighing 4 kilos (1.8 kg), sold for a price that works out to be about $4,700 per ounce ($166 per gram).
About 175 meteorites are identified as having come from Mars. Buying one would cost about $11,000 per ounce ($388 per gram).
Researchers can determine where meteorites come from through the use of their landing trajectories to project their paths back to the asteroid belt or comparing their composition with different classes of asteroids. Experts can tell where Moon and Mars rocks come from by their geology and mineralogy.
The limitation of those “free” samples is that there is no such thing as a strategy to know where on the Moon or Mars they got here from, which limits their scientific usefulness. Also, they begin to get contaminated as soon as they land on Earth, so it’s hard to inform if any microbes inside them are extraterrestrial.
Expensive elements and minerals
Some elements and minerals are expensive because they’re scarce. Easy elements within the periodic table have low prices. Per ounce, carbon costs one-third of a cent, iron costs 1 cent, aluminum costs 56 cents, and even mercury is lower than a dollar (per 100 grams, carbon costs $2.40, iron costs lower than a cent and alumnium costs 19 cents). Silver is $14 per ounce (50 cents per gram), and gold, $1,900 per ounce ($67 per gram).
Seven radioactive elements are extremely rare in nature and so difficult to create within the lab that they eclipse the value of NASA’s Mars Sample Return. Polonium-209, the costliest of those, costs $1.4 trillion per ounce ($49 billion per gram).
Gemstones will be expensive, too. High-quality emeralds are 10 times the price of gold, and white diamonds are 100 times the value of gold.
Some diamonds have a boron impurity that offers them a vivid blue hue. They’re present in only a handful of mines worldwide, and at $550 million per ounce ($19 million per gram) they rival the price of the upcoming Mars samples – an oz. is 142 carats, but only a few gems are that giant.
The costliest synthetic material is a tiny spherical “cage” of carbon with a nitrogen atom trapped inside. The atom contained in the cage is amazingly stable, so will be used for timekeeping. Endohedral fullerenes are made from carbon material that could be used to create extremely accurate atomic clocks. They will cost $4 billion per ounce ($141 million per gram).
Most costly of all
Antimatter occurs in nature, nevertheless it’s exceptionally rare because any time an antiparticle is created it quickly annihilates with a particle and produces radiation.
The particle accelerator at CERN can produces 10 million antiprotons per minute. That seems like lots, but at that rate it might take billions of years and value a billion billion (1018) dollars to generate an oz. (3.5 x 1016 dollars per gram).
Warp drives as envisaged by “Star Trek,” that are powered by matter-antimatter annihilation, may have to attend.