{"id":215236,"date":"2025-06-02T14:05:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T19:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/trillion-dollars-worth-of-platinum-waiting-to-be-mined-on-the-moon"},"modified":"2025-06-02T14:05:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T19:05:37","slug":"trillion-dollars-worth-of-platinum-waiting-to-be-mined-on-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/trillion-dollars-worth-of-platinum-waiting-to-be-mined-on-the-moon","title":{"rendered":"Trillion dollars\u2019 worth of platinum waiting to be mined on the moon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/trillion-dollars-worth-of-platinum-waiting-to-be-mined-on-the-moon2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Craters on the moon could hold over a trillion dollars\u2019 worth of platinum and other precious metals deposited there by asteroids. That means lunar prospecting may be more economically viable than travelling to asteroids individually to mine them \u2013 but the legality of doing this on the moon remains unclear.<\/p>\n<p>Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues looked at whether there may be commercial quantities of platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium) that were left behind by asteroids hitting the lunar surface.<\/p>\n<p>Image: NASA\u2019s Scientific Visualization Studio<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Mining craters on the moon could be more practical than extracting precious metals from asteroids, but it might also introduce new legal difficulties.<\/p>\n<p>By <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/author\/james-woodford\/\" class=\"\">James Woodford<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Craters on the moon could hold over a trillion dollars\u2019 worth of platinum and other precious metals deposited there by asteroids. That means lunar prospecting may be more economically viable than travelling to asteroids individually to mine them \u2013 but the legality of doing this on the moon remains unclear. Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1496,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}