Skip to main content

NASA spacecraft prepares to visit the metal asteroid Psyche

Engineers and technicians prepare to move the chassis of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft from its shipping container to a dolly inside JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility just after the chassis was delivered by Maxar Technologies in late March of 2021.
Engineers and technicians prepare to move the chassis of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft from its shipping container to a dolly inside JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility just after the chassis was delivered by Maxar Technologies in late March of 2021. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Out in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars lurks a strange beast: An asteroid made almost completely of metal. Asteroid Psyche is 140 miles in diameter and is composed of primarily iron and nickel, and the richness of its metal has led to it being dubbed the “$10,000 quadrillion asteroid.” NASA is planning to visit the asteroid soon, but not for mining purposes — rather, the aim is to learn about the formation of planets in the early solar system.

Recommended Videos

For this mission, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has just taken delivery of the Psyche spacecraft, which will be launched on its mission to investigate the asteroid in 2022.

The chassis of the spacecraft, delivered by the company Maxar Technologies, has already been packed with most of the hardware required for the mission. Now, the engineers at JPL will perform the final assembly of the craft before moving onto testing and launch preparations.

“Seeing this big spacecraft chassis arrive at JPL from Maxar is among the most thrilling of the milestones we’ve experienced on what has already been a 10-year journey,” said Arizona State University’s Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission, in a statement. “Building this complex, precision piece of engineering during the year of COVID is absolutely a triumph of human determination and excellence.”

With the launch scheduled for August next year, the team is working on adding the flight computer, communications system, and the low-power distribution system to the craft. They will also be performing tests as they install the final hardware, along with adding the mission’s three science instruments which will arrive over the next few months.

“It’s exciting watching it all come together, and it’s the part of the project life cycle that I love the most,” said Psyche Project Manager Henry Stone of JPL. “But it’s a really intense phase as well. It’s intricate choreography, and if one activity runs into a problem, it can impact the whole process. Staying on schedule at this phase of the mission is absolutely critical.”

Following the launch next year, Psyche is set to fly past Mars twice for a gravity assist before arriving at the asteroid in 2026.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
NASA’s ‘stuck’ astronauts have finally left the space station
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

After a nine-month stay that was only supposed to last eight days, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have finally left the International Space Station (ISS) and are on their way home.

Seated inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft alongside fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, Williams and Wilmore undocked from the orbital outpost at 1:05 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 18.

Read more
SpaceX just launched two major NASA missions at once — watch the highlights
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA's SPHEREx and PUNCH missions to orbit.

Following a scrubbed launch attempt 24 hours earlier due to weather conditions and a technical issue, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched two missions — SPHEREx and PUNCH — from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday night.

SPHEREx is a space telescope that will map our cosmos, while PUNCH comprises four small satellites that will study our sun’s outer layer and solar winds. Both were carried to orbit by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Read more
That killer asteroid probably isn’t going to hit us after all
Artist's impression of an asteroid. This image is not intended to reflect the characteristics of any specific known asteroid.

It seems that Earth isn't likely to be struck by an incoming asteroid after all, as scientists have revised the impact likelihood of object 2024 YR4. The asteroid which has a length of around 130 to 300 feet was spotted at the end of last year, and was originally projected to have a 1% chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. That probability went as high as 2.8%, but has now dropped considerably given new data.

Further observations were made this week, with data from the night of February 19 - 20 showing that the impact chance has dropped to 0.28%, according to NASA. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today that the impact likelihood had dropped even further and was now just 0.16%.

Read more