Artist’s concept of the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is thought to be a stripped planetary core (Maxar/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An asteroid that’s filled with gold and enough precious metals to turn everyone on Earth into a billionaire is being studied by Nasa.

The asteroid – known as 16 Psyche – has a mass of less than 1% of our moon and it contains heaps of platinum, iron and nickel alongside the gold. The combined total value of all those precious metals would equal out at something like $700 quintillion.

If you brought it back to Earth and shared out the profits equally, it would make all seven billion of us a billionaire many times over.

Sadly enough, it’s an economically impossibility. The combined world economy is £59.9 trillion – so injecting several quintillion (a one with 18 zeroes behind it) into it would cause the whole thing to come crashing down.




Logistically speaking, bringing back the whole asteroid would take some doing. It’s currently sitting out there somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.

Psyche measures about 140 miles across and Nasa has known about it for a while. The space agency is planning to launch a craft in August 2022 to visit the asteroid. The plan is to arrive there by 2026 and spend 21 months in orbit, conducting a full study of the space rock with equipment like an ultispectral imager, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer and a magnetometer.

Of course, this would only be for scientific purposes – Nasa isn’t looking to make money off the asteroid at the moment.

Artist’s-concept shows the spacecraft on Nasa’s Psyche mission near the asteroid (SSL/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

But others are convinced that mining asteroids is the next big thing.

‘It’s the next boom industry. Once you set up the infrastructure then the possibilities are almost infinite,’ Mitch Hunter-Scullion, who founded the UK-based Asteroid Mining Company after leaving university, told the BBC.

‘There’s an astronomical amount of money to be made by those bold enough to rise to the challenge of the asteroid rush,’ said Hunter-Scullion.

The Asteroid Mining Company plans to start mining operations in space by 2030.

Mining asteroids could be big business (BBC)

Meanwhile Nasa thinks 16 Psyche may have formed through collisions of planets during the formation of the solar system. Exploring it could tell scientists how the Earth’s core was formed.

‘Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets—including Earth—scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachable below planets’ rocky mantles and crusts,’ Nasa explained.

‘Because scientists cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.’