Fail Fast Schema Design

Asteroids have LOTS of value IF we can get our hands on them.

Space Gold

Let’s be honest, nothing is going to sell the general public on asteroid mining like landing a 50,000kg chunk of “space gold” on this planet.

To achieve this we have to figure out which of the 1,442,115 asteroids in our solarsystem are worth sending mining equipment to hopefully hit a rock with so much readily available ore that we can quickly fill our cargo and haul it back to earth.

For each of those asteroids there is some likelihood that many of our 119 elements in the periodic table can be extracted from those asteroids, 5 of those elements are currently traded commodities found on finance.yahoo.com;

Those commodities are measured per troy ounce.

One kilogram equals 1,000 grams or approximately 32.1507 troy ounces.

• copper - $5 / oz = $161 / kg
• gold - $3,043 / oz = $97,835 / kg
• platinum - $1,022 / oz = $32,858 / kg
• palladium - $974 / oz = $31,315 / kg
• silver - $34 / oz = $1,093 / kg

Falcon Heavy can bring down 50,000 kg from Low Earth Orbit

• copper = $161 * 50,000 = $8,050,000
• gold = $97,835 per kg * 50,000 = $4,891,750,000
• platinum = $32,858 * 50,000 = $1,642,900,000
• palladium = $31,315 * 50,000 = $1,565,750,000
• silver = $1,093 * 50,000 = $54,650,000

Schema

Fundamentals of Schema Design with MongoDB can be quickly summed up with:

Data that’s queried together is stored together

Since our objective is to mine the asteroid of its resources, we need to have an accounting of the resources. For simplicity sake we will take the following asteroid 2 of it’s potential 119 elements in the elements array:

{
  "spkid": 2101955,
  "full_name": "101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36)",
  "pdes": "101955",
  "name": "Bennu",
  "neo": true,
  "hazard": true,
  "abs_magnitude": 20.19,
  "diameter": 0.492,
  "albedo": 0.046,
  "diameter_sigma": 0.02,
  "orbit_id": "JPL 97",
  "moid": 0.0032228,
  "class": "C",
  "elements": [
    {
      "name": "Hydrogen",
      "mass_kg": 43063080,
      "number": 1
    },
    {
      "name": "Helium",
      "mass_kg": 14354360,
      "number": 2
    }
  ],
  "mass": {
    "$numberLong": "86054387340"
  },
  "moid_days": 0,
  "value": {
    "$numberLong": "417126801578"
  }
}