On 7 Dec 2014 at 18:37, Ian Whitchurch wrote:

>
> Oh, if you're feeling either nice or nasty to them, does any megacorp
> own the mineral rights to that asteroid ? Could the work they have
> done be considered an illegal survey ?
>
> Could they have actually found some valuable impurities ?

Unless it's a well differentiated body, the impurities are going to
be pretty much random rock dust.

You don't get concentrations of *anything* without various geological
processes that don't happen on small bodies.

A comet that's well on its way to "dying" (which results in a
carbnonaceous chondrite) is valuable for organics and for *nitrogen*
(one of the harder to obtain elements if you don't have a terestrial
type planet handy.

"Differentiated" bodies past the "ice line" (the point far enough
from the star for small icy bodies to survive, inside the ice line
the ice sublimes away) will have a "core" of dirt/rock, with a layer
of ice over that. Bigger ones will have gotten hot enough at the core
to not only melt the rock, but to have the nickel/iron (and elements
that prefer to dissolve in nickel/iron) seperate out to form a
metallic core.

Collisions with other bodies will break things up giving you chunks
of ice, ice/rock, rock, rock/metal, and metal. Maybe even the
occasional shards that still contain all three.

The stuff that was too small to differentiate will be a random mix of
ices and "dust". Mostly ices.

The differentiation. btw, happens early in the formation of a system
from a nebula. Since this is often triggered by a "nearby" supernova,
there's a lot more short-lived radioactive isotopes in the mix.

Larger bodies trap enough heat ftrom the decay to nelt the ice, and
have the "dust" settle to the core.

*Big* ones form rock in the core. Really big ones melt the rock and
have the nickel/iron etc settle into an inner core.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com