Asteroids and commerce

Like many people, I have been fascinated by the thought of asteroids whizzing around the sun (and occasionally close to, or into, Earth). When I was young I had a poster on my wall that included all the planets and two asteroids - Ceres (actually a dwarf planet) and Eros. Interestingly, although Ceres is the largest asteroid (at almost 1000 km in diameter) Eros is quite far down the list (and is only about 34 x 11 x 11 km).

Side note: there are some pretty good pictures of Eros (from the NEAR-Shoemaker mission) and some incredibly good pictures of Ceres (from the NASA Dawn mission). The Dawn mission also captured great pictures of Vesta, which is about 525km in diameter and the second most massive (and third largest) asteroid.

But the really 'valuable' asteroids could be quite different. (Unless there is something under the surface of, say, Ceres that has more value to us. Perhaps the bright spots on Ceres signal something there?)

But to get back on topic - I recently found a site that ranks asteroids by criteria such as 'most valuable', 'most cost effective' and 'most accessible', as well as giving information on their orbits and their next closest passes by Earth. Take a look at: http://www.asterank.com/. It seems like a pretty good informational site (outside of the rather speculative valuations).

Most of the 'most valuable' are not easily accessible, and many of the 'most accessible' are not valuable. The 'most cost effective' list ranks them by a combination of value and accessibility - ranking '1999 JU3' as the best bet. You can click on that row to see information about the asteroid and its orbit, etc. Or you can enter a name into the 'Lookup' field (hint: enter a few letters and then wait - it will then bring back a filtered list in the lookup field).

Some other interesting possibly mine-able asteroids:
1. One of the most massive metallic asteroid is probably ‘16 Psyche’ (could seriously damage the prices of Nickel, Cobalt and Iron)
2. Or ’21 Lutetia’ (would hit the same commodity prices)

I also saw that ‘2011 UW158’ is ranked as a very valuable asteroid for the Platinum in it. It just made a close pass by earth (http://www.space.com/30074-trillion-dollar-asteroid-2011-uw158-earth-flyby.html) but won't be back for almost 100 years. Also, if a 'trillion dollars worth' of platinum suddenly entered Earth's platinum market, I'm sure it would quickly be a tiny fraction of that!

(If looking up on the 'asterank' site, put ‘436724 (2011 UW158)’ in the lookup field)