NASA's mission to the 'golden asteroid' is on track after months of scrutiny from an independent review board that described it as possible to move forward with the Psyche mission. The space agency aims to venture to a metallic asteroid called 16 Psyche.
The asteroid contains gold and is believed to also contain platinum, iron, and nickel. Its estimated value is about $10,000 quadrillion, which is enough to make every person on Earth a billionaire. NASA-JPL said that the asteroid appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an ancient planet, one of the building blocks of the Solar System.
This illustration depicts the 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer-wide) asteroid Psyche, the target of NASA’s mission of the same name. Based on data obtained from Earth, scientists believe the asteroid is a mixture of metal and rock.
NASA's Psyche Mission
The Psyche mission will be sending a spacecraft to the metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission offers a unique window into the origin of the Solar System, particularly the history of collisions that led to the formation of terrestrial planets.
Teams from Arizona State University and NASA-JPL will be leading and managing the mission. Maxar is responsible for the spacecraft's solar-electric propulsion chassis and a payload that includes an imager, magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer.
According to Forbes, the Psyche mission was scheduled to launch in August 2022 and arrive at asteroid 16 Psyche in 2026. However, software issues and mission development problems occurred that made the mission miss its window. Then an independent assessed whether the mission will be able to overcome its issues for a launch in 2023, which now grants the go signal to proceed.
The new estimated launch date is on October 10, 2023. The mission is part of the Discovery Program NASA that aims to send low-cost robot space missions. Due to the delay, scientists estimate that the spacecraft will arrive on the asteroid by August 2029 instead of the original estimated data on January 2026.
READ ALSO: Quadrillion-Dollar Asteroid 16 Psyche May Be Less Metallic Than Expected
Why Explore the Golden Asteroid?
Asteroid 16 Psyche is basically a lumpy, cratered ball of nickel and iron that is almost as big as the whole state of Massachusetts and humans see it as a source of great wealth, per Inverse. When orbital mining takes off, asteroid 16 Psyche is going to be worth a lot of money even though scientists could not fully quantify its amount yet.
Astronomers including Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the principal investigator of asteroid 16 Psyche, said that Psyche is the core of a protoplanet or a mass of rock and metal that coalesced into a planet but did not accumulate enough to fully become one.
The core of Psyche is believed to be hot, molten metal before it cooled. Over time, collisions with other chunks of asteroids and other space rock may have contributed to the erosion of the outer layers of rock that left the failed planet's core exposed to space.
Astronomers noted that it is rare to study a planetesimal core directly. Asteroids like the 16 Psyche could offer insights into the anatomy of the still-churning Earth's core.
RELATED ARTICLE: Scientists Release Most Detailed Map of Asteroid 16 Psyche That May Give Insights How Solar System Originated [LOOK]
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