The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
It may not be a giant leap for mankind or even a small step for mining — not yet, anyway — but word that the Rosetta spacecraft is on track to reach a distant comet is certainly of interest to space-mining pioneers in Sudbury.
“It’s going to touch down on the surface and extract a sample with a lander-mounted drill,” said Dale Boucher, CEO of Deltion Innovations Ltd. “So, what this does is move the prospecting as we know it into a more common, everyday occurrence.”
Deltion has been developing mining systems that it hopes to employ on missions to extract water and minerals in space.
The Rosetta probe, which awoke from a three-year hibernation this week to send its first signal back to Earth, isn’t going to look for harvestable resources on its faraway ball of ice and rock, but that doesn’t mean useful information for commercial applications can’t come out of the experiment, said Boucher.
“In this particular case they’re looking at it from a scientific perspective — they want to understand what it is, so they’re going to analyze these samples,” he said.