On ore-bearing asteroid remnants in lunar craters

TL;DR

This paper estimates the number of lunar craters containing asteroid remnants with valuable resources, suggesting lunar impact sites may be more promising for mining than near-Earth asteroids.

Contribution

It adapts a probabilistic model to quantify lunar craters with ore-bearing asteroid remnants, providing new estimates for resource potential on the Moon.

Findings

Up to 6,500 craters with asteroid remnants containing platinum group metals.

Up to 3,400 craters with asteroid remnants containing hydrated minerals.

Lunar craters with ore remnants are more numerous than near-Earth asteroids, indicating potential mining advantages.

Abstract

We modify the probabilistic formalism developed by Elvis (2014) to estimate the number of lunar craters that contain ore-bearing asteroid remnants. When we consider craters at or above a threshold diameter of 1 km, we estimate an upper limit of ${\sim}6,500$ craters with asteroid remnants containing significant amounts of platinum group metals and an upper limit of ${\sim}3,400$ craters with asteroid remnants that contain significant amounts of water in the form of hydrated minerals. For a more conservative threshold of 5 km, we estimate $\lesssim400$ craters with asteroid remnants that contain significant amounts of platinum group metals. These values are one to two orders of magnitude larger than the number of ore-bearing near-Earth asteroids estimated by Elvis (2014), implying that it may be more advantageous, and hence more profitable, to mine asteroids that have impacted the Moon rather than the ones that are in orbit.