French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible.
. An amateur astronomer can see Psyche with a backyard telescope, but it appears only as a pinpoint of light.. To do its work, there's no need for the uncrewed spacecraft to land—instead, it will orbit the asteroid repeatedly and methodically, starting from 435 miles out and then going down to 46 miles from the surface, and perhaps even lower.
The central questions are these: Is Psyche really an exposed planetary core? Is the asteroid one big bedrock boulder, a rubble pile of smaller boulders, or something else entirely? Are there clues that the previous outer layers of this small world—the crust and mantle—were violently stripped away long ago? And maybe the most critical question: Can what we learn about Psyche be extrapolated to solve some of the mysteries about the Earth's...
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, undergoing final tests in a clean room at a facility near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA/Frank MichauxThe probe's body is about the same size and mass as a large SUV. Solar panels, stretching a bit wider than a tennis court, power the cameras, spectrometers and other systems.
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