NASA's Psyche Metal Asteroid Mission Launches This Week
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NASA's Psyche metal asteroid mission launches this week: Here's what you need to know:
NASA is preparing to launch its Psyche spacecraft on the first mission designed to study a metal-rich asteroid up close. The Psyche mission is set to blast off on Thursday (Oct. 12) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
After traveling an estimated 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is located at the far edge of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.
Once the spacecraft is in place, mission scientists will study the metal asteroid, which is different from the rock- and ice-dominated bodies studied in situ in the past, to learn more about how the rocky planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) formed.
Discovered in 1852, Psyche is considered one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt, and scientists have only been able to study it at a distance. Scientists think the asteroid is composed of the exposed core of a planetesimal, a small body that formed during planet formation as gas and dust around a star collapsed in dense patches.
A planetesimal could eventually go on to gather more mass and thus become a planet. But Psyche is thought to have failed to reach planet status because it collided with other larger bodies as the solar system was forming around 4.5 billion years ago, possibly stripping the metal-rich asteroid of its outer rocky shell and exposing its iron-rich core.
That means that studying this 173-mile-wide (279 km), potato-shaped asteroid could not only help reveal more about the collisions that took place in the early solar system but also provide scientists with a proxy for the inaccessible iron core of our own planet.
Psyche seems to diverge from the solar system planets born from planetesimals. Whereas the rocks of the inner solar system planets are replete with iron oxides - chemical compounds of iron and oxygen atoms - Psyche lacks these compounds. If Psyche is indeed composed of material left over from the birth of the rocky planets, its existence could point to a different type of planetary formation that diverges from the mechanism that created Earth.
But even if Psyche turns out not to be an exposed planetesimal core, the asteroid is still very interesting to scientists because it could mean it belongs to a population of never-before-seen primordial solar system bodies.
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