Asteroids are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system. As such, it is estimated that various and specific asteroid types likely contain an abundance of concentrated valuable minerals including water and rare metals such as platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, osmium and ruthenium. Beginning with the first asteroid, 1 Ceres, discovered on the first day of the 19th century, to the first “Near Earth” (NEO) asteroid, 433 Eros, discovered nearly a century later, there are now over 600,000 known asteroids, nearly 10,000 of which are Near Earth asteroids. While these numbers may be impressive, science has only discovered approximately 1% of all the asteroids estimated to reside in our solar system. The Near Earth asteroids contain some of the most accessible real estate for deep space mission into the solar system, with about 17% of the NEO population being easier and less costly to reach than landing on Earth's Moon.
Asteroids are filled with precious resources, everything from water to platinum. Some near-Earth asteroids contain platinum group metals in much higher concentrations than are found within the richest Earth mines. Asteroids also contain more common metallic elements such as iron, nickel, and cobalt, sometimes in incredible quantities. In addition to water, other volatiles, such as nitrogen, CO, CO2, and methane, exist in large quantities. Semiconductors, metals, and non-metals used in microelectronics manufacture may also be found in asteroids, such as phosphorus, copper, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, cadmium, indium, tin and tellurium.