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Fables have declared for millennia that the Moon, one of the most influential planets in our solar system, is made of green cheese.

The legend arose from an ancient tale that described how a wolf was convinced by his prey, a wiley fox, that the moon’s reflection in a pool was a tasty round cheese. The hapless wolf was persuaded to drink the contents of the pool in an attempt to sink his teeth into the delicious delicacy, whereupon he burst and died, and the clever fox escaped.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover has bored into a Martian rock and pulled out its first sample of the planet’s insides to analyze. This could be the first step to mining Mars.

In New Scientist, Lisa Grossman quotes NASA’s Louise Jandura as saying, "This is the only time anybody’s drilled into Mars. Getting deeper into the rock allows us to unlock a kind of time capsule into what Mars was like 3 or 4 billion years ago."
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A new gold rush is on! Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (along with filmmaker James Cameron) are backing a plan to mine gold and other precious metals from asteroids.

They’ve formed a company called Planetary Resources, which will start out by developing low-cost robotic spacecraft that can survey nearby asteroids. NASA will probably be one of their first customers.
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When US astronauts planted an American flag on the moon, it made other countries nervous because it seemed as if our country might be "claiming" it. Now space lawyers say that the international legal system must be improved and expanded before any products that are space-mined from asteroids are brought back to Earth to sell.

If plans to use robots to mine asteroid succeed, it would create its fair share of confusion about mining rights in space–from who owns what to how business interests beyond Earth’s orbit would be specifically protected.
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