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NASA aims to uncover the secret life of the mineral-rich asteroid Psyche in a pioneering mission that could provide more clues about Earth’s origins as well as tantalizing insights for mining entrepreneurs and disaster planners.
It is scheduled to be released on Thursday US Space Agency mission To an asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, it aims to reveal how Earth and other rocky planets formed.
The eight-year adventure into the ruins of outer space will be the first opportunity for a spacecraft to observe a predominantly metal celestial body, rather than one made of rock, ice or gases.
The mission to Psyche, named after the Greek goddess of the soul, will be closely watched by mining projects aiming to replenish scarce resources and emergency planners aiming to avoid a disaster from space junk hitting Earth.
“It’s a fundamental exploration of a new kind of world,” said Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. “There aren’t a lot of completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system that we can see, so that’s what’s so exciting about this.”
The mission, costing approximately $1 billion, is scheduled to take just under six years to reach the asteroid. It will then conduct observations for another two years.
Psyche is shaped like a potato and is large by asteroid standards, measuring 280 kilometers across at its widest point. Its area is approximately the size of the US state of California.
“We don’t know what Psyche looks like,” Elkins-Tanton said, suggesting it may be the site of giant cliffs and bear the scars of greenish-yellow lava flows from sulfur-rich volcanoes. “This is our scientifically motivated idea,” she added, warning that the idea may be “completely wrong.”
The mission’s results could provide a new window into the origins of planets, including Earth, which are thought to have metallic cores buried deep and cannot be explored. Previous observations, including from a flying stratospheric telescope mounted on a Boeing 747, indicate that Psyche is rich in iron.
One hypothesis is that Psyche is the remains of a planetary building block known as a planetesimal that has had its outer layers stripped off after colliding with other bodies. The second idea is that it may be the remains of another type of metallic object that formed elsewhere in the solar system.
Asteroids, leftovers from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago, pose possibilities and threats, as well as providing clues to cosmic history. Potential space mining projects hope to exploit them to obtain precious metals, but they face major logistical and financing challenges.
Asteroids attract more attention because of their potential to collide with Earth catastrophically. Last year, NASA crashed a satellite into the Dimorphos space rock, in a test of the latest deflection technology.
NASA said on Wednesday that a sample delivered to Earth last month from the asteroid Bennu showed evidence of water and high carbon content. Together, she added, these things “could indicate that the building blocks of life on Earth can be found in rocks.”
Colin Snodgrass, professor of planetary astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, said widespread interest in asteroids had led to a “golden age” for missions to fill significant gaps in knowledge about them.
“There are billions of asteroids out there and we’ve visited a few of them. There’s really a lot of diversity you can go and explore.”
The Psyche mission will be carried out by a small satellite launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon Heavy rocket provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. NASA hopes to begin sending images back to Earth once the asteroid is located in about six years.
The mission will involve the first use beyond lunar orbit of an innovative method of solar-powered ion propulsion. Known as Hall thrusters, they work by passing electromagnetic fields through xenon gas, which on Earth is used in car headlights and plasma televisions.
Gas emissions give the thrusters a startling blue glow, recalling images of spacecraft created by early science fiction filmmakers decades ago.
