NASA’s Psyche spacecraft embarked on its journey to the metal-rich asteroid from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on October 13 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Key points
- Psyche is both the name of a metal-rich asteroid, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, and the name of the NASA space mission.
- This pioneering mission represents the first such effort to examine an asteroid whose surface is primarily made up of metallic components.
- By August 2029, the spacecraft will begin to orbit the 173-mile-wide (279-kilometer-wide) asteroid – the only metal-class asteroid ever to be explored.
- Because of Psyche’s high iron-nickel metal content, scientists think it may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet. The goal is a 26-month science investigation.
