laymens theoretical science II

reading about the space elevator, and moon harvesting valuble isotopes my brain put the two together and came up with this. say we contsructed a giant tether, with some sort of sail type device so that if we were to rocket it up into space it would be able to unfold and collect all of the valuable space minerals out there. my knowlegde of the sun is that it ejects massive amounts of valuable minerals that are deflected by our atmosphere. well if we put a tether out there to collect them and then reel them in would it not be a worth while venture?

Well.......hmmm...........no.
Most of the particles in space are traveling at hyper speeds.
Correct me on my math here, I'm think I'm right.
If a tether and a sail was anchored here on our planet, then it would still be travelling at the same linear speed that the earth travels at around the sun; about 66,00 miles per hour. A grain of sand simply floating in space and not moving at would still have an impact velocity of 66,00 miles per hour. The grain of sand would have the impact kenitic energy of roughly 10,000 ft- pounds. After a while, your sail would be shredded to bits. This is a very real concern to NASA and ISS, not only are there naturally occuring particles, but we, men, have left all kinds of junk floating around up there.

The particles are much smaller than a grain of sand, and despite their outstanding speed, their tiny mass means that only a very thin sheet of aluminum is needed to protect astronauts from them.

This also means it's worthless to try to gather them, btw.

why would it be worthless, i read in PM that there are very valuable minerals floating around in space like Helium-3 that gets stuck onto the moons surface. i had not taken into account the velocity factor. this could be countered with a simple thruster scheme decelerating the velocity from time to time, pushing against the earths momentum there by colliding with the particles and collecting them, as for being shred to bits i doubt minscule particle would stand a chance against our most admantine nano-carbons.

[edit on 13-12-2004 by sturod84]

Could it be the costs of constructing, maintaining, and processing the sail and it's materials would result in a financial loss? Let's say this things costs 100 billion dollars to make (totally pulled out of my butt) and has annual costs of 1 billion, but only rakes in, say, a few billion a year? Is the density of such particles enough to make this a viable idea?

[edit on 12-13-2004 by Esoterica]

thats what im trying to figure out!

Solar Wind:
en.wikipedia.org...
Solar wind is mostly electrons and protons

And to get elements in big enough amounts would require big collector.

Solar wind density:
sec.noaa.gov...