Chemistry
Mining with minibots and mirrors needs a plan.
Recyclers do a lot of automatic sorting. What are the ways?
On Earth there are storage tanks, processing tanks, gas storage tanks. They buffer production of materials before consumption. Can we go direct and have no stores at the site? Or are the raw materials scattered and need different handling at different places. Water is local, for example.
(BBC) with any mine it can take up to 50 years before you have a decent production describes mining in Greenland in the cold. Our process has to be automated and exponential and rapid.
A swarm mirror weighs around 5g/m2, we start assuming a 1km2 mirror which has the additional function of a sail when needed, 3x payload, roughly 20 tonnes mass per mirror. So the swarm weighs 4E18kg which is 0.1% of the mined ore. That is a hint of the extraction efficiency required at the refinery.
It is unlikely that unmanned conventional commercial-style refining of undifferentiated ore will produce clean products useful for manufacture. We need to create an all-purpose one-stage process which fills reserves with pure elements. Given immense energy and superconducting magnets we can do that.
- transform raw material to plasma
- pass through large mass spectrometer
- catch elements in traps
If the traps can produce quantized shaped weights then we have the basis of an engineering feedstock.