2023-10-10 06:00:09
The asteroid Psyche, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, might well hold the secrets to the formation of our Solar System. This metallic rock, which might have been a constituent element like the bare heart of a primitive planet, now disappeared, is the The objective of a NASA mission aimed at unraveling the mysteries of its composition and history.
An illustration of NASA’s Psyche probe approaching the asteroid of the same name.
Credit: Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
The Psyche mission, the same name as the target asteroid, will take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 12 at 10:16 a.m. (Hour is a unit of measurement of time. The word also designates the magnitude… ) local on board a rocket (Rocket may refer to:) Falcon Heavy from SpaceX (SpaceX (or Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) is an American company…). A technical problem with the ship’s thrusters delayed the launch by a week, but the team fixed the problem.
The space probe will travel approximately 3.5 billion kilometers to reach the asteroid Psyche in July 2029. It will pass then two years studying the object (Generally speaking, the word object (from the Latin objectum, 1361) designates an entity defined in…), mapping its surface (A surface generally designates the superficial layer of an object. The term a…) and collecting data (In information technology (IT), data is an elementary description, often…) on its composition.
Psyche is a 280-kilometer-wide asteroid that might be the exposed core of a primitive planet. It was discovered in 1852 and named following the Greek goddess of the soul. The asteroid might offer a unique glimpse into Earth’s core and other rocky planets, as drilling down to Earth’s core is unfeasible.
The spacecraft is equipped with a magnetometer, a gamma and neutron spectrometer. …), as well as a multispectral imager. These instruments will make it possible to determine the chemical composition of the asteroid and search for evidence of an ancient magnetic field (In physics, the magnetic field (or magnetic induction, or flux density…).
The Psyche mission cost around $1.2 billion and was delayed due to software and testing problems. It also impacted other missions, such as the VERITAS mission to Venus, which was delayed indefinitely.
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