NASA journeys to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche
It's a world like no other: a metal-rich asteroid that could be the remnants of a small planet, or perhaps an entirely new type of celestial body unknown to science.
A NASA spacecraft blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center Friday bound for Psyche, an object 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) away that could offer clues about the interior of planets like Earth.
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Here's how NASA's Psyche mission could unveil the interior secrets of planets
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.
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