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NASA aims to uncover the secret life of the metal-rich asteroid Psyche in a groundbreaking mission that could provide more clues to Earth’s origins and provide mining entrepreneurs and disaster planners with Tantalizing insights.
Due to launch on Thursday, nasa expedition team The asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter aims to reveal how Earth and other rocky planets formed.
The eight-year journey to the rubble of outer space will be the first time a spacecraft has had the opportunity to observe an object composed primarily of metals, rather than rock, ice or gas.
The Psyche mission, named after the Greek goddess of the soul, will also be closely watched by mining companies aiming to replenish scarce resources and emergency planners aiming to avoid a catastrophic impact of space debris on Earth.
“This is an initial exploration of a new world,” said Psyche mission principal investigator Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. “There aren’t that many completely unexplored worlds in our solar system that we can explore, so that’s what’s exciting.”
The nearly $1 billion mission plans to reach the asteroid in less than six years. It will then conduct observations for another two years.
Psyche is shaped like a potato and is large by asteroid standards, measuring 280 kilometers at its widest point. Its surface area is roughly equivalent to the area of California in the United States.
“We don’t know what Psyche looked like,” said Elkins-Tanton, who thinks it may have been a place with huge cliffs and traces of yellow-green lava flows from a sulfur-rich volcano. “This is our scientifically motivated idea,” she added, warning that the idea could be “completely wrong.”
The expedition’s findings could provide a new window into the origins of planets, including Earth, whose metallic cores are believed to be buried too deep to be explored. Previous observations, including those from the Flying Stratospheric Telescope mounted on a Boeing 747, have shown that Psyche is rich in iron.
One hypothesis is that Psyche is the remnant of planetary building blocks called planetesimals, which were stripped of their outer layers after impacting other objects. A second idea is that it could be the remnant of another metallic body that formed elsewhere in the solar system.
Asteroids, debris from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago, bring possibilities and threats and provide clues to the history of the universe. Future space mining companies hope to use them to mine valuable metals, but face huge logistical and financial challenges.
Asteroids are causing further concern because of their potential for catastrophic collisions with Earth. NASA last year crashed a satellite into the space rock Dimorphos to test its latest deflection technology.
Samples delivered to Earth from asteroid Bennu last month showed evidence of water and high carbon content, NASA said on Wednesday. These “may indicate that the building blocks of life on Earth may be present in the rocks,” the report said.
Colin Snodgrass, professor of planetary astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, said widespread interest in asteroids had sparked a “golden age” of missions to fill huge gaps in knowledge about asteroids.
“There are billions of asteroids out there, and we’ve visited a fraction of them. There’s really a lot of variety out there to explore.”
The Psyche mission will be flown by a van-sized satellite launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon Heavy rocket supplied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. NASA hopes to start beaming images back to Earth as soon as it finds the asteroid in about six years.
The mission will be the first to use innovative methods of solar ion propulsion beyond lunar orbit. So-called Hall thrusters work by passing an electromagnetic field through xenon gas, which is used on Earth in car headlights and plasma televisions.
The gas emissions give the thrusters a striking blue glow, reminiscent of images of spaceships created decades ago by the first science fiction filmmakers.
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