Happy Friday. The latest IAU nomenclature bulletin (vol. 4, #2) now makes it official. The main-belt asteroid- formerly under a temporary designation 1981 ET27- is now officially, permanently numbered and named. It is now (12994) Pitufo. The low number indicates its old, early discovery and orbit determination (yes, we’re that far behind in numbering and naming)… and “Pitufo” designates, in Spanish, “smurf.”
Gargamel wanted to catch smurfs, because he was planning on turning them into gold (and eating them, in some storylines). In the 21st Century, we want to visit asteroids- and in some cases, steer them- for multiple reasons, including their precious metal content, and their water/organics. Some of the iron meteorites/M-type asteroids are mostly or overwhelmingly iron; borne by the iron are contents of platinum-group metals exceeding a rich deposit/mine on Earth. (On Earth, the PGMs mostly sank to the core, when molten iron dragged it there. Earth’s moon is even worse. That moon was formed when crust and mantle material was blown off in an impact, re-formed in Earth orbit, and re-cooled… forming a second core, pulling even more PGMs down into inaccessibility.)
Some of the carbonaceous meteorites/asteroids are water/organic bearing, with contents of several percent of either (and both, if you’re lucky). Even some of the “boring” (stony or “ordinary” chondrites) are cross-contaminated by carbonaceous materials falling on them, so they have measurable water/organic levels. Earth’s moon, meanwhile, was molten material twice: pre-giant impact, and then as an accreting, new body. Some areas were then triple depleted: major impactors re-melted the crater area, releasing light components to space when the lower gravity could not hold them. Double (and assuredly triple) lava durations mean volatile material, like water and most organics, has been thoroughly boiled off to space.
Unlike Gargamel, we have the good fortune of having some of our targets leave the ‘smurf forest’ (the Main Belt), and come to us (NEOs). Of course, an asteroid is faster than a ‘micro-midget’ (with ~1 apple legs), but numerous researchers, over decades, have studied recovering asteroid contents, or capturing entire such bodies. Ultimately, the other way around is another possibility: we go to them, and use the resources in space (in situ resource utilization, or ISRU). Yum!