Faculty
Engineering
Supervisor Name
Dr. Gordon Osinski
Keywords
asteroid mining, asteroid bennu, cis-lunar resource extraction
Description
Deep space asteroid mining presents the opportunity for the collection of critical resources required to establish a cis-lunar infrastructure. In specific, the Project Khepri team has focused on the collection of water from asteroid Bennu. This water has the potential to provide a source of clean-energy propellant as well as an essential consumable for humans or agriculture on crewed trips to the Moon or Mars. This would avoid the high costs of launching from Earth - making it a highly desirable element for the future of cis-lunar infrastructure. The OSIRIS-REx mission provided a complete survey of asteroid Bennu and is set to return regolith samples to Earth in 2023. This makes asteroid Bennu a well-understood and low-risk target that is estimated to be around 6.26% water by mass. The Khepri Project comprises a team of international students, academics, and industry subject matter experts working on the technical design, business case, and political aspects of a mission to mine asteroid Bennu for water. The research output explores the multi-year mission that the Khepri team has proposed.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the Project Khepri team members and contributing professors for all of the hard work and dedication that they have put forth towards this project. A special thanks to Cam Dickinson for making this all possible.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Poster
Included in
Aerospace Engineering Commons, Air and Space Law Commons, Business Analytics Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Controls and Control Theory Commons, Geological Engineering Commons, Mechanical Engineering Commons, Mining Engineering Commons, Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons, Other Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons, Systems Science Commons
Project Khepri: Mining Asteroid Bennu for Water
Deep space asteroid mining presents the opportunity for the collection of critical resources required to establish a cis-lunar infrastructure. In specific, the Project Khepri team has focused on the collection of water from asteroid Bennu. This water has the potential to provide a source of clean-energy propellant as well as an essential consumable for humans or agriculture on crewed trips to the Moon or Mars. This would avoid the high costs of launching from Earth - making it a highly desirable element for the future of cis-lunar infrastructure. The OSIRIS-REx mission provided a complete survey of asteroid Bennu and is set to return regolith samples to Earth in 2023. This makes asteroid Bennu a well-understood and low-risk target that is estimated to be around 6.26% water by mass. The Khepri Project comprises a team of international students, academics, and industry subject matter experts working on the technical design, business case, and political aspects of a mission to mine asteroid Bennu for water. The research output explores the multi-year mission that the Khepri team has proposed.
Comments
Western News Article - Project Khepri