TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – While some miners were pioneering deep-water marine mining, Planetary Resources this week launched the first of two technology demonstration spacecraft this year, which it eventually intended to use to conduct asteroid prospecting.
The Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft launched on Tuesday from Cape Canaveral on board the SpaceX Falcon 9 that was on its way to the International Space Station (ISS) as a part of the CRS-6 crew resupply mission.
Planetary advised that once the spacecraft had reached the ISS, A3R would be brought on board by the astronauts and be put in a queue for launch from the Kibo air-lock into low-Earth orbit, tentatively scheduled for July.
A3R would also complete the mission of the first Arkyd 3, which the company lost when Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket exploded just after takeoff, by testing the subsystems the company would need to venture out into the solar system and prospect for valuable resources on asteroids.
During its 90-day Earth-orbiting mission, it would send back data on the health of its subsystems to the ground team headquartered in Redmond, Washington, and complete its mission with a fiery re-entry into earth’s atmosphere as a result of its natural atmospheric orbital-decay.
Planetary Resources planned to launch a larger, more capable spacecraft later in the year.
In parallel with A3R, the company had been working on a line of robust Arkyd 6U ScienceCraft that it would use to test the scientific instruments and deep space technologies at the heart of the asteroid prospecting missions, which would also provide a platform for third parties to fly missions with the company’s technology.
Arkyd 6 (A6) would be the first of these missions to launch and Planetary Resources had contracted Spaceflight Services to launch in a rideshare configuration with Formosat-5, currently scheduled in December.
Built-in compliance with the 6U CubeSat standard, the spacecraft would have precision pointing capability, high-bandwidth communications and flexible architecture, providing a robust platform for anyone conducting space research and development, without having to build their own space system.
“We are a team of scientists and engineers who believe that lowering the barriers to the scientific exploration of space is an important step along the path to expanding humanity’s reach into the solar system,” the company said.