NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech and Arizona State University will launch the Psyche mission in October 2023, sending a spacecraft to a metal asteroid.
A NASA JPL mission is set to launch on Friday, and will mark a space exploration milestone: the Psyche mission will be the first time the space agency sends a probe to a world primarily made of metal, rather than rocks and ice.
Enter Psyche, an asteroid orbiting around in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter. It may actually be the exposed core of an early planet.Another difference is that Psyche is missing the iron oxide compounds found in rocks on Venus, Earth and Mars. That means — if Psyche was the core of a planet — at some point the process by which it formed changed from the process for rocky planets in our solar system.This illustration by Peter Rubin shows the 140-mile-wide asteroid Psyche.
By sending the probe, scientists hope to confirm their theory that Psyche is in fact the core of an early planet and determine how old it is. The spacecraft will also test a new method of communication — the Deep Space Optical Communication — aimed at getting more information back to Earth in a set amount of time.
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