juliensimon/asterank-asteroid-mining
Asterank Asteroid Mining Economics Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face. Economic analysis of 600,000 asteroids for space mining potential, combining NASA/JPL orbital data with estimated accessibility and resource value from the Asterank project. Dataset description Asterank ranks nearly 600,000 cataloged asteroids by estimated mining profitability. It combines multiple data sources -- NASA/JPL Small-Body Database orbital elements… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/asterank-asteroid-mining.
Asterank Asteroid Mining Economics
Part of the [Orbital Mechanics Datasets](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/orbital-mechanics-datasets-69c24caca4ab3934c9856994) collection on Hugging Face.
Economic analysis of 600,000 asteroids for space mining potential, combining NASA/JPL orbital data with estimated accessibility and resource value from the Asterank project.
Dataset description
Asterank ranks nearly 600,000 cataloged asteroids by estimated mining profitability. It combines multiple data sources -- NASA/JPL Small-Body Database orbital elements, spectral classifications, and published scientific papers on asteroid composition -- to estimate each asteroid's resource value and the cost of reaching it.
Key economic fields:
- estimated_value_usd -- total estimated resource value based on spectral type and size
- estimated_profit_usd -- value minus estimated mission cost (delta-v dependent)
- closeness_score -- accessibility metric (lower delta-v = higher closeness)
- asterank_score -- composite ranking combining value, profit, and accessibility
Schema
Quick stats
- 600,000 asteroids ranked by mining economics
- 1,800 Near-Earth Objects, 0 Potentially Hazardous
- 595,200 with measured diameters, 600,000 with spectral types
- 7 distinct orbital classes
- Most valuable: 511 Davida (1903 LU) at $15,382,627,787,839,414,272 (profit: $1,064,010,723,169,747,328)
- Median estimated value: $0
- Total estimated value of all asteroids: $105,731,413,739,251,945,177,088
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/asterank-asteroid-mining", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
# Top 20 most profitable asteroids
top_profit = df.nlargest(20, "estimated_profit_usd")[
["full_name", "orbit_class", "spectral_type_smassii",
"estimated_value_usd", "estimated_profit_usd", "earth_moid_au"]
]
# Near-Earth asteroids sorted by profit
neo_mining = df[df["is_neo"] == True].nlargest(50, "estimated_profit_usd")
# Value distribution by orbit class
by_class = df.groupby("orbit_class")["estimated_value_usd"].agg(["count", "median", "sum"])
by_class = by_class.sort_values("sum", ascending=False)
# Accessible targets: low MOID + high profit
accessible = df[
(df["earth_moid_au"] < 0.1) &
(df["estimated_profit_usd"] > 1e9)
].sort_values("estimated_profit_usd", ascending=False)Data source
Asterank by Ian Webster, combining data from NASA/JPL Small-Body Database, spectral survey data, and published asteroid composition models.
Related datasets
- neo-close-approaches -- NEO close approaches from NASA JPL
- space-track-satcat -- Full NORAD satellite catalog
- space-launch-log -- Global launch history
Pipeline
Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets
Citation
@dataset{asterank_mining,
author = {Simon, Julien},
title = {Asterank Asteroid Mining Economics},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/asterank-asteroid-mining},
note = {Based on Asterank (asterank.com) asteroid mining economics data}
}