The Psyche mission is scheduled to begin its journey to an asteroid of the same name on 5 October – it could help us understand Earth’s core and how our planet formed
Part of the Psyche spacecraft inside the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the Kennedy Space Center in FloridaNASA is preparing to launch a mission to a one-of-a-kind asteroid called Psyche – which may actually be the exposed metal core of what was once a young planet. The mission, also called Psyche, is scheduled to launch on 5 October.
The asteroid Psyche takes about five Earth years to complete an orbit around the sun, and the closest it gets to Earth is about three times the distance between our planet and. Because of its distance and relatively small size – less than 300 kilometres across at its widest point – we have very few observations of it and know almost nothing about its surface, its origins, or even its composition.
has made headlines, bringing it back to Earth is not in this mission’s remit. “We have no technology to bring this back, and even if we did manage to bring it back to Earth it would probably be a catastrophic mistake for the planet because we don’t know how to park something in orbit,” says Psyche principal investigatorAdvertisementvery few limitations on what we could discover. We’ve never even seen an object of this type up-close before.
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