NASA on Friday launched a spacecraft from Florida on its way to Psyche, the largest of the several metal-rich asteroids known in our solar system and a body thought to be the remnant core of an ancient protoplanet.
The Psyche probe, folded inside the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on a planned journey 2.2 billion miles through space. The spacecraft, roughly the size of a small van, is due to reach the asteroid in August 2029.This asteroid measures roughly 173 miles across at its widest point and resides on the outer fringes of the main asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
After reaching the asteroid, the spacecraft would then orbit it for 26 months, scanning Psyche with instruments built to measure its gravity, magnetic proprieties and composition. "So we say, tongue-in-cheek, that we're going to outer space to explore inner space," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator for NASA's mission partner Arizona State University, told a briefing for reporters on Tuesday.
The asteroid, discovered in 1852 and named for the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology, is the largest of about nine known asteroids that appear from ground-based radar observations to consist largely of metal, with rocky material mixed in. Still, scientists can only guess at what Psyche looks like, Elkins-Tanton said.
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