Minerals and energy resources engineering has expanded to operations in remote and extreme environments. These new operations bring numerous challenges regarding exploration, utilisation, economics and management. We aim to analyse technologies specific to off-Earth resource exploration, extraction and new resource extraction systems, and processing in space and rural environments. In particular, our capability and proven expertise in Space Resource Utilisation research has connected us into the mining and space industries.
We closely collaborate with National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Space Agency, European Space Resources Innovation Centre, and other industry partners. Exploration in these environments requires specific geophysical instruments engineered for being deployed with restricted payload weights and operating in extreme environments. We work with our partners to design such devices and interpret the geological environments they will be deployed into.
Applications include environmental impact of space mining, mining optimisation and resource processing, integrated economics modelling, extraction technologies for extra-terrestrial operations, geophysics-based exploration, and resources assessment.