A NASA spacecraft is about to embark on a 2.2 billion-mile journey through space to reach a rare, mineral-rich asteroid located outside the orbit of Mars.
The Psyche mission is scheduled to launch on Thursday at 10:16 a.m. ET, weather conditions permitting; Last Climate prediction pridect 20% chance of favorable weather conditions at launch.
The spacecraft will ride aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch will be broadcast live via NASA YouTube channelAnd also the space agency website And program. You can also listen via the recap below. Live coverage will begin at 9:15 a.m. ET.
“This is the first mission to explore a planetary body that observations have indicated is made primarily of metal,” Carol Polansky, NASA’s project scientist for Psyche, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “There are a lot of unknowns about its actual shape, gravitational field and spin axis.”
The Psyche mission will encounter a metallic space rock in the main asteroid belt. Psyche is a 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer) asteroid that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe Psyche may be the shattered core of a planet, one of the building blocks that come together to form a planet.
“Psyche in particular is interesting because it seems like it could be an early developing planet… and it has already reached the point where it has melted and allowed metallic material to go to Earth.”“The core has a rocky surface similar to other bodies in the solar system,” Polanski said. “But fortunately for us, those outer rocks were likely stripped away by the impact, exposing that inner core.”
“[The mission] “This is a bit like our view of the materials that were originally there, coming together to form planets,” she added.
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The Psyche spacecraft will orbit its target, armed with a multispectral imager, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer, and a radio instrument to map the asteroid. According to NASA. Based on investigation With early observations, scientists will begin to learn about the asteroid’s size and shape, and begin to build a picture of what Psyche is, according to Polanski.
Psyche will travel about 2.2 billion miles to reach the main asteroid belt. If all goes well, the spacecraft will enter the orbit of the asteroid Psyche in late July 2029 and begin its mission in August of the same year.
A week ahead of its original release date of October 5. Engineers have discovered a problem with the Psyche spacecraft’s thrusters This could have caused it to overheat during its eight-year mission. As a result, the mission’s launch date was delayed by a week as the team resolved the issue.
The mission has launch opportunities every day until October 25.
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