I'm delighted to welcome Jemima Pett to the blog today as part of the blog tour for ZANZIBAR'S RINGS, the exciting new science fiction novel.
Jemima reckons she read all of the science fiction in her local library, and most enjoys alternative universes, time travel, consequences of social change and unusual ideas surrounding alien species. Her favourite authors included Anne McCaffrey, Fritz Lieber, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. These days she likes Becky Chambers, Matt Haig, Lindsay Buroker, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Clare O’Beara, M T McGuire, Jennifer Ellis… She also loves series – once involved with characters she loves to read their continuing adventures.
She has degrees or diplomas in maths, earth sciences and environmental technology and studied with the Unthank School of Writing while she lived in Norfolk. She now lives in Hampshire, where she enjoys rewilding her garden, raising organically grown vegetables, and birdwatching.
She would most like everyone to use their natural resources sustainably, since we only have the one planet to support us.
Her latest book is Zanzibar’s Rings: Viridian System Series (Book 3).
Visit Jemima’s website at www.jemimapett.com or connect with her at Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram and Pinterest.
10 Things You Might Not Know About Asteroid Mining
By Jemima Pett
1. Asteroids are currently classed as stony, metal or chondrite. The chondrites are clay and silicate rocks, and are, generally speaking the oldest types of rock in the solar system. Stony types are silicate and nickel-iron; metallic are nickel-iron but with compositional differences related to how far from the Sun
they were formed.
2. Solar
system metallic asteroids are generally up to 80% iron, and the rest a mixture
of nickel, iridium, palladium, platinum, gold, magnesium, osmium, ruthenium,
rhodium and possibly others.
3. The
Earth company Planetary Resources was set up in 2012 to mine asteroids in
space, focusing on the platinum group of metals, but its assets were acquired
in 2018. [article]
4. In
2020 NASA awarded contracts to four companies to ‘extract small amounts of
regolith’ (asteroid surface layer) by 2024 [article]
5. A
single 500-meter diameter platinum-rich asteroid can contain more platinum
group metals than have been mined on Earth throughout history [citation].
6. In
the Viridian System, asteroids are similarly rich in the (fictitious) metallic
element orichalcum.
7. Orichalcum
is used throughout the galaxy for instantaneous communications, regardless of
distance.
8. Only
three other systems are known to have orichalcum deposits, and none in great
quantity.
9. Orichalcum
occurs in both large and small quantities in Viridian asteroids; as metal
strips (seams or veins), as nuggets within other rocks (like geodes), and as
fines (like gold panning).
10. ‘Raw’
orichalcum has a propensity to draw electrical power from anything too close to
it, making extraction a hazardous operation, and one which requires
considerable ingenuity to develop the right tools and processes—in the
near-vacuum of space.
11
Dolores is stuck in warp with a very dangerous passenger, Pete gets his shuttle back home on manual. But how come anything in close contact with pure orichalcum fixes itself? Just flying through Zanzibar’s Rings solves the problem—as the Federation’s fighters find, as they descend on the Viridian System to take possession of the planets.
Zanzibar’s Rings brings the Viridian System series to a conclusion with a bang—and a lot of whimpering. And possibly a view of things to come.
Book Information
Release Date: February 22, 2022
Publisher: Princelings Publications
Kindle: ISIN: B093QFX6DV; 380 pages; E-Book, $2.99
Apple Books: https://apple.co/3mSjrvZ
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093QFX6DV
No comments:
Post a Comment