A NASA probe will start making its way to a strange metallic asteroid less than a month from now, if all goes according to plan.
The agency’s Psyche spacecraft is scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 5 (though the launch window extends to October 25, with each day offering one opportunity).
Psyche will reach its namesake—a 170-mile-wide (280-kilometer) metallic object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter—in the summer of 2029, providing a feast for scientists and plenty of eye candy for space enthusiasts.
“I’m very much looking forward to seeing those first images,” Laurie Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said during a news conference Wednesday (September 6). “It will be amazing, when we finally get to see what this metallic asteroid looks like up close.”
Next month’s launch will be a historic moment for SpaceX, too: It will mark the first launch of the Falcon Heavy for NASA, as well as the rocket’s first interplanetary mission. The Falcon Heavy, the second most powerful rocket currently in operation (after NASA’s Space Launch System), has launched just seven times so far, most recently on July 28.
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The breath was supposed to be really high. The original plan called for a launch in the fall of 2022, but problems with the spacecraft’s flight program led to a one-year delay.
Members of the mission team, who are eager for the next liftoff, say all of those kinks have been fixed.
“It’s getting increasingly real,” Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement Wednesday. “We are counting down the days. The team is all set to send this spacecraft on its journey, which is very exciting.”
The liftoff will begin an extended flight phase for Psyche, which will use highly efficient solar electric propulsion to make its way into the asteroid belt. A “gravity-assisted” flyby of Mars in May 2026 will boost Psyche’s speed, helping it reach its target space rock in late July 2029.
The probe will then study the asteroid closely for 26 months, spinning lower and lower until it orbits just 40 miles (64 kilometers) above Psyche’s surface. Scientists don’t know what that surface looks like, and they haven’t had a close look at Psyche or any other metallic asteroid, but they have some interesting ideas.
“One possibility is that Psyche’s metallic surface is covered in small, spiky, cup-shaped meteorites that collide with the metal, and small pellets of metal are blown off of it as they hit,” says the mission’s principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton. He said this from Arizona State University during the press conference on Wednesday.
“We expect part of the surface to be metallic and part non-metallic,” she added. “What’s the non-metallic part? Rock? Sulfur? We really don’t know. I would say the one thing we’re very certain of is that there’s a metal, and the metal will be similar to metallic meteorites.” “.
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And Psyche has plenty of minerals, in fact, about $10 quintillion worth of minerals here on Earth, Elkins-Tanton calculated a few years ago. On Wednesday, she stressed that this figure should not be taken lightly.
“We don’t have any technology to bring Psyche back to Earth,” said Elkins-Tanton. “If we did, it would likely be a catastrophic mistake.”
“Suppose we actually manage to bring Psyche back. Then the metals market will flood, and it will literally have no value,” she added. “So calculating its value is a fun, unsubstantiated intellectual exercise. We’re not going out there to mine an asteroid.”
Instead, the $1.2 billion Psyche mission will measure the asteroid for science. The probe will study the space rock using three dedicated instruments, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a multispectral imager, and a magnetometer. The spacecraft will also use its onboard radio communications system to conduct “gravity science,” learning more about Psyche’s internal structure and composition.
Such work would reveal a lot about the asteroid, which scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet, the raw materials from which rocky planets like Earth and Mars are made.
“The first mission to explore an asteroid with a surface that contains significant amounts of metal rather than rock or ice,” NASA officials wrote in the mission description, “seeks to better understand iron cores, an unexplored building block of planet formation.”
They added: “It will be the first mission to directly examine the interior of a previously layered planetary body, which they expect will shed additional light on how Earth and other rocky planets formed.”
The 6,056-pound (2,747-kilogram) Psyche probe also carries a NASA technology demonstration called DSOC (short for “Deep Space Optical Communications”).
DSOC will use a laser system to transmit and receive data during the mission’s long journey to the asteroid belt. Until now, these high-capacity optical communication systems have only been used in spacecraft as far away as the Moon. DSOC aims to extend this much further, into the very deep space.
“We are very excited about the launch and look forward to the important lessons learned, which will enable future human missions to Mars using very high precision instruments,” said Abi Biswas, DSOC Project Technologist at JPL. Press conference on Wednesday.
