"Hello, world!"

A NASA tweet greeted the internet Wednesday with a beautiful image of the bluish gem-like Earth—the first image captured by the newest weather satellite orbiting the planet.

GOES-18, short for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, blasted off in March from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket thanks to a collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA along with several other partners.

GOES-18 is a weather monitoring satellite that should help meteorologists determine potential areas of disaster before they occur in the western part of the United States as well as Alaska and Hawaii, according to the NOAA. It will primarily be used to monitor and predict disaster events like hurricanes, thunderstorms, floods, dense fog and fire.

Among its utility belt of tools, GOES-18 has an Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), which can view the Earth in 16 different kinds of spectral bands including two visible channels, four near-infrared channels and 10 infrared channels. The previous generation of GOES could only view five different bands. The ABI will help scientists predict where fires on the west coast could start before they ever form, said Pam Sullivan director of the GOES-R program.

Off-earth mining may once have been purely the stuff of science fiction, but now it's potentially a US$1 trillion industry that is likely to be vital if humans are serious about colonizing Mars or the moon.

Sustaining life on other planetary bodies will almost certainly require the use of in-situ resources which currently remain untapped.

UNSW experts—Professor Andrew Dempster and Professor Serkan Saydam, the director and deputy director of the Australian Center for Space Engineering Research (ACSER)—say the challenges posed by mining such materials in space are enormous.

Robotics may be the answer, but even terrestrial mining systems are not yet fully autonomous, so new technologies will need to be developed.