NASA’s mission to the solar system's largest metallic asteroid promises to show us the iron-nickel core of a dead planet. New research, however, hints that this asteroid is much more.
No one is certain what the Psyche craft will spy once it takes a closer look at the seemingly metallic surface of its namesake.on February 8, 1969, a bluish-white fireball streaked across the sky above the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. A meteor getting sucked into Earth’s gravity had exploded in the atmosphere. Scorched rocks rained over a 200-square-mile area around Pueblito de Allende in Chihuahua, where locals picked up the first bits of debris.
In August, a spacecraft will launch on a 41-month journey to visit Psyche, the biggest metallic asteroid in our solar system. The behemoth is suspected to be the iron-nickel core of a growing planet whose outer layers were stripped in cosmic hit-and-runs. We’ll never get a direct look at Earth’s core—at least not until we develop the superhuman technology to drill down 3,100 miles and withstand temperatures of 9,000°F and pressure 3 million times that of the atmosphere.
Maybe asteroids could make us rich via space mining, or extinct like the dinosaurs, but they are perhaps most worthy of exploration because they hold the secrets of our solar system’s past. Earth’s most ancient rocks have been melted and mashed up so many times that it’s rare to find traces of its 4.5 billion-year history. If our planet has lost all memory of its infancy, then visiting an asteroid could be like peeking at its baby pictures.were observed around 220 years ago.
In its two years orbiting the asteroid, Psyche will map the surface—and peer below it to detect the mysterious body’s composition.Early one morning in January 2017, Elkins-Tanton’s cell phone lit up while she was spending winter break in the snowy hills of western Massachusetts. It was Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
What really indicated Psyche might not be so metallic is its density. Calculating that metric requires an object’s mass and size, and with more observation, the once-inconsistent numbers for Psyche have started to converge. In athat Elkins-Tanton and her colleagues published in February 2020, they say the best measurements put the asteroid’s density between about 3.4 and 4.1 grams per cubic centimeter. An intact iron-nickel core should be twice that.
“We are under the gun,” says Henry Stone, the Psyche project manager at JPL. Because the journey depends on that gravity assist, the team has a strict window for launch that opens in August and closes a few weeks later.
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