16 Psyche Asteroid: NASA Sending 2022 Mission to $10,000 Quadrillion-Worth Metallic Space Rock to Study Its Origin

Found within the asteroid belt between the Red Planet and the Gas Giant of the Solar System, the Psyche asteroid is a 124 mile-wide space rock that circles the sun. New measurements of Psyche asteroid's surface temperature revealed that they are packed full of precious metals that could be worth over $10,000 quadrillion.

Scientists believe that the asteroid could be the core of an early planet in the Solar System. NASA said that they would send a mission to Psyche asteroid in 2022 that will arrive in 2026 to determine its origins.

16 Psyche Asteroid Overview

According to NASA, Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovered the Psyche asteroid, formally known as 16 Psyche, on March 17, 1852. He named it after Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul who married Eros, the God of Love.

16 Psyche is a giant space rock that is three times farther away from the sun than Earth, with an average size of about 1/16 in diameter of the moon. Scientists have classified 16 Psyche as M-type for being metallic, unlike most asteroids which are either rocky or icy.

They believe that the Psyche asteroid might represent the exposed core of an early planet that shed its rocky outer layers billions of years ago due to countless catastrophic collisions.

It takes about five years for the Psyche asteroid to complete one orbit of the sun, but one Psyche day is only about four hours. The asteroid is located in the asteroid belt, which is approximately 235 million to 309 million miles from the sun.

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Thermal Mapping of Psyche Asteroid

As California News Times reported, scientists created a new temperature map of the asteroid to provide insight into its surface properties ahead of NASA's Psyche mission. Thermal observations from Earth that measure light emitted by an object other than the sun are typically in infrared wavelengths. They only produce 1-pixel images of asteroids that tell about an asteroid's thermal inertia or their ability to heat up in sunlight or to cool in darkness.

Low inertia is associated with layers of dust, while high inertia means that the asteroid has a rocky surface. The team of scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to get a more reliable prediction of the Psyche asteroid's landscape before the NASA probe arrives in 2026. It helped them create the temperature map that identifies thermal emissions from the Psyche asteroid at a resolution of 18 miles (30 kilometers).

When they combined the data set of 18 miles x 18 miles, it produced an image of the asteroid composed of 50 pixels which are significantly better than the typical single-pixel images of space rocks in the asteroid belt. This was made possible by ALMA that used millimeter wavelengths that are longer than the typical infrared wavelengths used in previous asteroid observations, allowing scientists to combine data from the 66 telescopes.

They found that the surface emission of the asteroid is affected by the metals on the surface, which indicates that the Psyche asteroid is 30% metal. Further analysis suggests that surface rocks are composed of metallic grains, reinforcing previous theories that it could be an asteroid formed closer to the Sun billions of years ago.

In 2022, NASA's Psyche mission will launch and is expected to arrive in the metallic world in 2026. According to NASA, this will be the first mission to investigate a metallic asteroid and not a rocky or icy one.

The team published the findings of the study titled "The Surface of (16) Psyche from Thermal Emission and Polarization Mapping," in the Planetary Science Journal.