NASA will search for iron and nickel in the Psyche asteoris

All ready for the launch of the NASA spacecraft towards 16 Psyche, an asteroid rich in rare metals orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The goal is not to extract them, but to study the core

"This is an opportunity to explore a new kind of world: not of rock or ice, but of metal."

This is what Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission, said in 2017, when NASA authorized the billion-dollar project.

And now the countdown has begun for NASA's 4 billion km long mission to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to find out more about an asteroid called 16 Psyche.

NASA and SpaceX have set an October 5 launch target on a SpaceX company's Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

210 kilometers wide, asteroid 16 Psyche could be worth $10 trillion. What makes the nickel-iron metallic asteroid unique is that it could be the partial core of a 'planetesimal', a solid object that could serve as the foundation for a planet. So NASA's goal is not to extract these metals from the asteroid 16 Psyche, but to study their composition.

All the details.

NASA'S PSYCHE MISSION

The US space agency said a team of 30 engineers and technicians is working nearly around the clock to prepare the spacecraft, also called Psyche.

16 Psyche is a rare metallic asteroid possibly composed of iron, nickel and gold, but this is based only on observations of its brightness made by telescopes. “Discovered on March 17, 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, Italian astrologer and director of the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples and who chose to name his discovery in honor of the nymph Psyche, a figure from Greek mythology, the asteroid is located about 370 millions of kilometers away from our planet” recalls the Corriere .

THE TARGET

Once the goal is achieved, the NASA spacecraft will spend 26 months in orbit mapping and studying the properties of the asteroid.

The asteroid Psyche could be part of the core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet. Deep within terrestrial rocky planets – including Earth – scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably deep beneath the planets' rocky mantles and crusts.

Since we cannot directly see or measure the Earth's core, Psyche will offer a unique window into the process that led to the creation of the terrestrial planets. It will in fact give planetary scientists the opportunity to study an iron core like the one located at the center of the Earth and to discover a new type of metallic world in the solar system.

"16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a nucleus," NASA's Lindy Elkins-Tanton said. interior by visiting outer space”.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/la-nasa-cerchera-ferro-e-nichel-nellasteoride-psyche/ on Wed, 30 Aug 2023 06:09:05 +0000.