NASA today launched its first-ever mission to a metal-rich asteroid — specifically 16 Psyche, which lies in an orbit around the Sun, between Mars and Jupiter.
The asteroid — one of the dozen most massive in the Solar System — is about 140 miles in diameter, and alone contains around a hundredth of the mass of the asteroid belt.
It was first discovered back in 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, and named in reference to the Greek goddess of the soul, and the fact that it was the sixteenth minor planet to be discovered.
The Psyche mission has a roughly 2.2 billion-mile-journey ahead of it, with NASA anticipating that the craft will not reach its target until August 2029.
The space agency hopes that studying 16 Psyche will help us better understand how the Earth and other rocky planets first formed.
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NASA and other national space agencies have visited asteroids before — just last month, for example, the OSIRIS-REx mission brought back to Earth the largest-ever asteroid sample from asteroid Bennu.
However, previous missions have only explored asteroids that were primarily composed of rock or ice.
In contrast, scientists believe that 16 Psyche is overwhelmingly made up of metallic iron and nickel — much like the core of the Earth.
Nuclear engineer Dr Thomas Prettyman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona is the lead of one of the Psyche mission’s main working groups.
He said: “Psyche may be the stripped core of a small planetesimal. If so, the Psyche mission has the potential to shed new light on the inner workings of planetary cores.”
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Experts believe that 16 Psyche may be the surviving mass left behind after a violent space-based hit-and-run tore the outer rocky layers off the progenitor protoplanet.
Planetary scientist Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, of Arizona State University, told the Associated Press: “It’s long been humans’ dream to go to the metal core of our Earth. I mean, ask Jules Verne!”
However, she conceded: “The pressure is too high. The temperature is too high. The technology is impossible.
“But there’s one way in our solar system that we can look at a metal core — and that is by going to this asteroid.”
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