Simply put, "a minor allows a student the opportunity to add training in another discipline," explains Tracy Camp, a professor and head of the computer science department at Colorado School of Mines.

Matt Siegfried, now at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and his colleagues studied snow accumulation at 23 GPS stations in West Antarctica from 2007 to 2017.

Yet the notion of extracting platinum, gold and other valuable minerals from heavenly bodies and propelling them back to Earth is more fiction than science. “The economic analysis doesn’t make sense,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center ....