NASA launched its latest venture into outer space on Friday morning, sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche to learn more about the object that has long been a mystery to scientists and to determine what it is made out of.

The spacecraft, which is also named Psyche, is beginning its six-year mission to the Jupiter-Mars asteroid belt, where it will look at the asteroid that scientists believe is made out of mostly metal.

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“We’re really going to see a kind of new object, which means that a lot of our ideas are going to be proven wrong,” Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University who serves as the mission’s principal investigator, told the New York Times on Friday.

Although the asteroid is too far from Earth to make mining it and returning the riches feasible, scientists suspect the object is worth astronomical amounts of money. It is likely made up mostly of iron and nickel, and scientists suspect it is rich in precious metals as well. Estimates have put the value of the object in the quadrillions. One quadrillion is equal to 1,000 trillion.

Psyche is located approximately 150 million miles from Earth, and the spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in August 2029. The mission was initially intended to start last year, but staffing changes, miscommunication, and issues testing the navigation software that would guide the spacecraft through the solar system caused the craft to miss its launch window.

The asteroid was first discovered in the 19th century by an Italian astronomer named Annibale de Gasparis, who noticed it had a star-like light. But in the 1960s, astronomers noted that the color of the asteroid was more like iron after viewing it through a telescope. Astronomers also bounced waves of radar off Psyche, and the reflections coming back to Earth were brighter than those that came from other objects in the asteroid belt, which indicated a reflective surface.

“It became pretty clear that there’s some component of the surface that’s very radar reflective,” said Dr. Jim Bell, who is also a professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University and part of the mission. “And the simplest way to do that is with metallic fragments.”

The orbit of the asteroid also indicated that it was much larger in size than initially believed, and it was far denser than water, ice, and rock. However, recent measurements indicate it is a mix of metal and something else because the density is not as high as metals.

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“My best guess is that it’s more than half metal based on the data that we’ve got,” Dr. Elkins-Tanton said.

The spacecraft will now head toward Mars, where it is expected to arrive in March 2026 before it begins its final descent to Psyche. The entire journey to the asteroid will be 2.2 billion miles, and the craft will spend at least 26 months in orbit of the asteroid to study its surface.