In Avatar, the valuable mineral sought by human miners on Pandora is unobtanium. The RDA treats it as an extremely profitable resource and builds its major operation around extracting it from the moon.
The film identifies unobtanium as a room-temperature superconductor. That property makes it extraordinarily valuable to the energy-hungry civilization of Earth, whose ecological and economic pressures help motivate the expedition to Pandora. The Omaticaya clan’s Hometree stands above one of the richest deposits, making the site a central target of the RDA.
The word “unobtanium” is also a long-standing engineering term for a hypothetical or exceptionally difficult-to-obtain material. Avatar uses that familiar science-fiction expression as the mineral’s proper name. It should not be confused with Pandora’s biological network, the Na’vi language, or the moon’s fictional atmosphere; unobtanium is specifically the resource driving the mining conflict.