Recently, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a 170 m asteroid Dimorphos at 6.6 km/s, as the first on-orbit demonstration of deflecting an asteroid by kinetic impact. The DART spacecraft was set to impact the center of Dimorphos nearly head-on. Earth-based telescopes have now confirmed that impact successfully changed Dimorphos' orbit period by 32 minutes, much more than expected.

But, where should we impact an asteroid to most effectively deflect its orbit? Simply towards the center of the asteroid? These questions have yet to be well investigated.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, researchers of Tsinghua University proposed an optimal kinetic-impact geometry to improve the effective magnitude of kinetic-impact deflection, which should promote our understanding of how to make full use of a kinetic impactor and get best results.

About a decade ago, the prospect of "asteroid mining" saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there's been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a human presence in space will entail harvesting resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and beyond. In a recent paper, a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, examined the potential impact of asteroid mining on the global economy.

NASA has just launched its first rocket in the Artemis program, which will, among other things, take scientific experiments to produce metal on the moon.

In recent years, a number of businesses and organizations have ramped up efforts to establish technologies on the moon. But doing work in space is expensive. Sending just one kilogram of material to the moon can cost US$1.2 million (A$1.89 million).

What if we could save money by using the resources that are already there? This process is called in-situ resource utilization, and it's exactly what astrometallurgy researchers are trying to achieve.

Why the moon?

The moon has amazing potential for future space exploration. Its gravity is only one-sixth as strong as Earth's, which makes it much easier to fly things from the moon to Earth's orbit than to fly them direct from Earth! And in an industry where every kilogram costs a fortune, the ability to save money is extremely attractive.

Although people have been looking at making oxygen and rocket fuel