NASA launched its Psyche spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center Friday morning en route to study a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, that lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - OCTOBER 13: In this handout provided by NASA, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket ... [+]
The Psyche mission is NASA’s first to study an asteroid made up of more metal than rock or ice, and it’s the first NASA launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
NASA plans for the Psyche spacecraft to be captured by the asteroid’s gravity in late July 2029, and to begin its mission that August.
Psyche will spend two years orbiting the Psyche asteroid to collect data on its composition, map its surface, and take photos to send back to Earth.
Scientists think the asteroid, which is shaped like a potato and is 173 miles at its widest point, was the iron-rich core or part of a core of a small planet that formed in the solar system billions of years ago, and remains after multiple violent collisions during the formation of the solar system.
NASA says studying the Psyche asteroid might offer insight into what the Earth’s core and other terrestrial planets’ cores are like and how the planet cores formed.
The Psyche spacecraft is powered by solar-electric ion thrusters, and is the size of a small van.
The metal-rich asteroid was discovered in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer, and is sometimes called 16 Psyche because it was the sixteenth asteroid discovered. Psyche is named after the Greek goddess of the soul. The asteroid, which also orbits the Sun from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is three times farther from the Sun than Earth. Scientists don’t know what the Psyche asteroid looks like, but have created 3D models based on collected data, according to NASA. The asteroid is estimated to be 212 to 256 pounds per cubic foot. The surface gravity on the asteroid is less than it is on Earth and on the Earth’s moon. Last September, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully crashed into an asteroid to push it out of its natural orbit to test if NASA can reroute other asteroids aimed at Earth. And last month, NASA successfully received its space capsule with the largest soil sample from the surface of an asteroid yet. The Psyche launch was delayed from earlier this week due to bad weather.
"So we say, tongue-in-cheek, that we're going to outer space to explore inner space," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the principal investigator of the Psyche asteroid for Arizona State University who partnered with NASA on the mission, told reporters earlier this week.
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