“In mineral exploration, there are no silver bullets, unfortunately,” says Matt Pearson, chief exploration officer and co-founder of Fleet Space. The Australian-based technology company provides an end-to-end mineral exploration solution, designed for use in space but used by mining operators on Earth.
Used by major industry names including Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold, Core Lithium, Ma’aden and Rex Minerals, Fleet Space’s AI-powered ExoSphere solution incorporates ambient noise tomography, magnetotellurics, and active seismic and predictive modelling technologies to provide 3D subsurface insights. Accompanied by cloud processing and a network of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to provide real-time data processing, the suite offers non-invasive subsurface insights that reduce the need for invasive drilling in exploration.
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The technology is already deployed in more than half of Tier 1 mines, according to Pearson, with customers on every continent except Antarctica. Having experienced rapid growth, he expects to see continued uptake – and anticipates that exploration and mining in space will soon become a reality.
Speaking to Mining Technology, Pearson characterises the company as “space pirates”, looking to “adventure out in the stars and totally obsessed with buried treasure, whether that is ice or habitation zones or minerals”.
Credit: Fleet Space.
Eve Thomas (ET): Your technology has been created with space in mind. Why and how does it benefit mining operators on Earth?
Matt Pearson (MP): We overcomplicate the technology, because we have some amazing people that get inspired by solving this problem on other worlds, and then we bring that back to Earth. Suddenly, it is orders of magnitude beyond what people would have expected if we just tried to solve the problem slightly better than what is available on Earth today.
We asked customers [on Earth] how long it was taking to get data back, processed and reported on from the field, and they said, start to finish, around nine months to a year. Well, if Matt Damon was stuck on Mars, we wouldn’t want to bring him back then send him out again nine months later. So, from completing a few days of surveying [on Earth] to reporting back on what is there, our turnaround time is 48 hours. I don’t think we would have achieved this if we weren’t thinking about doing it for other planets.
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By GlobalDataWe are trying to do this for every piece of the value chain. We are experimenting with how to build a better drill for another planet, because someone has got to drill a hole on Mars eventually. We don’t want to drill very many holes, because it is fraught with problems, but if we were going to build something that’s 100-times better [than the current technology], what would that look like?
ET: Are there going to be massive mining operations on the Moon, or on Mars?
MP: I hope not on the Moon but maybe Mars. We have already discovered lots of huge metal deposits in the asteroid belt and in near-Earth passes from asteroids coming through all the time. What is exciting for the mining industry is, unlike on Earth, we know exactly where those ore deposits are, and they are very pure metallic deposits because they are basically the remnant cores of half-formed planets. We can see them and can measure them through spectroscopy, so we know what they are made from.
We might spend billions of dollars building a platinum mine on Earth, but we could mine one asteroid for 50,000 years and extract the same amount of platinum every year from something that we can see now – we just have to develop the technology to go and get it. That is not trivial, of course, but it is exciting.
I am not a big fan of mining the Moon. We might need to have some human habitation to push further into space from the Moon or near the Moon, but there are so many resources available in in our asteroid belt that we could make mining on Earth almost obsolete if we get it right. It is wild to think, but wouldn’t it be amazing if, 100 years from now, Earth was a garden planet and that type of heavy industry happened off-world, so we could preserve Earth and other planets as well?
As crazy as that seems, look how far we have come in the past 100 years. It was around 120 years between the first powered flight on Earth and the first powered flight on another planet: the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. It is a big timescale, but BHP’s Olympic Dam has a plan into the 2100s, so these are timescales that the mining industry works on regardless.
ET: What do your customers think about mining astronomical objects in space? Is this a conversation people are already having?
MP: We get an exciting response. I have sat down with senior exploration managers who say: “Well, if you can do it for an asteroid, you can probably do it for us.” They appreciate that we are trying to push things, but to pay the bills, we are making that technology available on Earth today.
On Earth, every major mining company is looking for ways to integrate modern technology, new sensors, a lot more data. They want the ability to process huge amounts of data, like every industry is doing, but it is harder in mining. We need solutions that are tuned for the particular problems we face.
At first, we were a little bit embarrassed about our space DNA, saying: “Maybe one day we will become a space company”, but now we are loud and proud that this is where we are going, and it is just getting people more excited about what we can do today but also what we can do together in space.
Nasa, Rio Tinto and BHP have been working for years on what scalable exploration off-world looks like, and what we can learn on Earth from that. It is weirdly natural, as I say all the time: it is all rocks. We are talking about the same problems, the same geophysics, whether it is this world or another one.
ET: Space exploration is emissions-heavy, yet Fleet Space is looking to address some of the environmental challenges facing the mining sector. How do you reconcile these apparent contradictions?
MP: It follows what I was saying earlier: we want to drill fewer wasted holes on Earth and take a non-invasive approach. It is like the medical industry before the X-ray and the ultrasound were invented. Doctors would cut you open to see what was wrong, and a lot of people paid the ultimate price. It is a similar thing for Mother Earth. We want to look before we do any kind of biopsy.
There are different approaches to space exploration, different attitudes to other planets. There is the prevailing thought that “Mars is a dead world, so we can do whatever we like with it”. I think that is a very cavalier approach that we would probably want to discourage. Every day, discoveries are being made by one little rover trundling over the surface. We are seeing evidence of billion-year-old life, potentially. One seismometer on the surface of Mars has told us that there is liquid water in the core still. There are untold discoveries and wonders on these planets and taking a non-invasive approach is important.
Launching rockets can be high-emission, but we like to do a lot with very little. We buy unused space on rockets, so our mission profile is lessened a little bit. Because of that, we work on miniaturised technology, and then we are really focused on looking before we leap, taking a non-invasive approach and understanding before we do anything too heavy handed.
ET: To what extent is space and mining exploration going to become part of the same conversation?
MP: I think it will be [part of the same conversation] and that will be a very good thing. Every time there has been a leap forward in civilisation, it is usually tied to metal, very often to copper. The Bronze Age started by picking up weird green rocks off the ground, and that was a big leap forward in human civilisation. Now, with the energy transition, we need to increase the amount of copper production again.
We don’t want civilisation to stagnate. We want to keep going, with all the benefits that a wealthier society hopefully imparts on everyone. Within the last couple of hundred years even, there have been massive leaps forward in education, health and equality, and all these things are tied to technological improvements. We want that to continue, but it is difficult to do that without destroying the planet we are on unless we can find abundant energy and resources somewhere else.
Doing it off-planet means that we don’t have to make such a mess here, but hopefully we will also make less of a mess here because of what we learn about efficiency. We just cannot use the same volumes of water [in space], and we can’t use the same number of people; if we are going to do it in space, we have to do it robotically, remotely and efficiently. That has all sorts of benefits for safety and environmental impact. The more that these can be the same conversations, the better for us all.
