Trillion dollars’ worth of platinum waiting to be mined on the moon

Mining craters on the moon could be more practical than extracting precious metals from asteroids, but it might also introduce new legal difficulties

By James Woodford

2 June 2025

Lunar craters could be a rich source of platinum

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Craters on the moon could hold over a trillion dollars’ worth of platinum and other precious metals deposited there by asteroids. That means lunar prospecting may be more economically viable than travelling to asteroids individually to mine them – but the legality of doing this on the moon remains unclear.

Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues looked at whether there may be commercial quantities of platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium) that were left behind by asteroids hitting the lunar surface.

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“Today, astronomy is done to satiate our curiosity,” he says. “It has very few practical applications and is mostly paid for by taxpayer money, meaning that research funding is at the mercy of governmental policy. If we can monetise space resources — be it on the moon or on asteroids — private enterprises will invest in the exploration of the solar system.”

The team modelled the fraction of lunar craters thought to have been created by metallic asteroids, the number of these asteroids that had a sufficient concentration of platinum group metals, and how many would have crashed on the moon with a velocity small enough to leave significant remnants behind. They found that out of around 1.3 million craters on the moon with a diameter greater than a kilometre, nearly 6500 were made by asteroids containing commercial quantities of platinum.

This means there are potentially “a lot more craters on the moon with ore-bearing asteroidal remnants than there are accessible ore-bearing asteroids”, says Chennamangalam. At a rough estimate, he thinks there could be $1 trillion worth of platinum and other metals available for mining in lunar craters.