Canadian-French astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, who was renowned for his work popularizing space science, died Friday aged 91, his son said in a post on Facebook.

"My whole family joins me in the pain of having to announce that our dear father has gone to join the stars," Benoit Reeves said.

The history of the universe was Reeves' life passion—he famously said that "to look far is to look early," evoking the concept of space-time—and he was also an ardent defender of planet Earth.

Born in Montreal on July 13, 1932, his thirst for knowledge began at a young age.

At night at their home in Quebec, Reeves and his family would go out to admire the sky, where he first learned to recognize constellations using a cardboard sheet.

It's unlikely to be a bad omen, but NASA's mission Psyche is currently due to launch on Friday 13 October. Lifting off at 10:19 EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, it faces a perilous journey and isn't scheduled for arrival at its namesake asteroid, 16 Pscyhe, until 2029.

Asteroid 16 Psyche (meaning "soul" in Greek) was discovered in 1852 and is named after an ancient Greek princess who married Eros (the namesake of another asteroid). It orbits the sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, at approximately three times the distance from the sun as Earth. It is a massive M-type asteroid (M stands for "metal-rich"), over 230km across.

Astronomers have to be careful with the term metal though, as in stellar physics "metallicity" means anything heavier than helium. In this case though, we are talking about metals such as iron and cobalt.

To give an idea of scale, if the sun was shrunk down to the size of an official NBA basketball, then the asteroid's diameter would be about the same size as the thickness of three pieces of paper (0.3mm), and located at a distance of 161 meters away.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft rocketed away Friday on a six-year journey to a rare metal-covered asteroid.