NASA’s mission to examine and investigate the asteroid Psyche in detail is planned to start in August. NASA recently announced August 1 as a probable launch date. The mission will be launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A.
The 16 Psyche asteroid, one of the largest in our Solar System, is made up of gold, nickel, and iron reserves and is said to be worth more than Earth’s economy. The asteroid is estimated to be worth over $10,000 quadrillion dollars.
NASA has unveiled a new spacecraft named “Psyche” for this mission, which will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to reach the asteroid situated between Mars and Jupiter. In 2026, the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid after a four-year voyage.
NASA’s Discovery missions include the 16 Psyche asteroid mission. “This is what the Discovery Program missions are all about,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator in Washington, D.C. “Boldly going to areas we’ve never visited to enable innovative science.”
According to NASA, the spacecraft will orbit the asteroid for 21 months in order to study it and learn more about its composition as well as how metal core asteroids and planets are generated. This will also be a significant step in the study of Earth’s formation.
The mission’s goals include employing a multispectral imager, magnetometer, gamma ray and neutron metre, and other scientific instruments to determine the age of regions on the asteroid, research its origin, characterise its terrain, and examine dips in the asteroid’s gravity.
Deep Space Optical Communication, a novel laser communication technique, will also be tested on the 16 Psyche Mission (DSOC). For deep space communication, this method encodes data in photons at infrared wavelengths. This device, developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, could speed up communication between Earth and deep space, allowing more data to be delivered.