Laser Processing of Asteroid Simulants

Asteroid mining and redirection are two trends that both can utilize lasers, one to drill and cut, the other to ablate and move. Yet little is known about what happens when a laser is used to process the types of materials we typically expect to find on most asteroids. To shed light on laser processing of asteroid material, we used pulsed Nd:YAG lasers on samples of olivine, pyroxene, and serpentine, and studied the process with a high-speed camera and illumination laser at 10~000~frames~per~second. We also measure the sizes of the resulting holes using X-ray micro-tomography to find the pulse parameters which remove the largest amount of material using the least amount of energy. We find that at these power densities, all three minerals will melt and chaotically throw off spatter. Short, low-power pulses can efficiently produce thin, deep holes, and long, high-power pulses are more energy efficient at removing the most amount of material. We wil also present some preliminary results of the effects of spallation of these materials.