NASA launches a spacecraft to visit Psyche, an invisible metallic world

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NASA has launched its first mission to a mysterious world made largely of metal, on a journey to find out if an asteroid is the exposed core of an early planetary building block from the beginning of the solar system.

The Psyche mission lifted off at 10:19 a.m. ET Friday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Psyche will be the first of many upcoming NASA science missions scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket.

The mission, named after 16 Psychic asteroid will be observedIt will travel about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) over the next six years to reach the space rock, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, said David Oh, Psyche’s chief operations engineer. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“We are launching a mission to an object that humanity has never studied up close before,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s principal investigator, foundation professor, and professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “This will be the first time we’ve visited a world with a metallic surface. There aren’t a lot of completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system for us to see, and that’s what’s so exciting about this.”

Scientists believe that the large M-type, or metallic, asteroid could be the exposed core of an early planetary building block, and may resemble the cores of rocky planets in our solar system, such as Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The core may have been exposed by violent collisions with other rocky bodies early in the formation of the solar system.

Ground-based and space telescopes have observed Psyche in the past, primarily detecting radiation bouncing off reflective metal on the asteroid’s surface. Together, these observations helped scientists develop a model of the shape of the asteroid, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts without Cape Cod., The surface area is equivalent to the size of California, Elkins-Tanton said.

But even using the Hubble Space Telescope, Psyche only appears as a few pixels.

“We don’t know what Psyche looks like,” Elkins-Tanton said. “I always joke that it’s potato-shaped because potatoes come in many shapes, so I’m not wrong. But we’ll find out when we get there.”

The Psyche mission, which was scheduled to launch in October 2022, has faced its share of delays.

Last year, there was not enough time to fully examine the spacecraft’s flight software to ensure it was ready before the deadline. The 11-week launch window has closed. This year’s launch window was postponed from October 5 to October 12 to give engineers enough time to adjust the temperature limits of the cold nitrogen gas. The thrusters on the spacecraftWhich will be used to guide it in space.

“There could have been a potential risk of the thrusters overheating, so it was a serious problem that we had to deal with,” said Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we probably would have found out right away if we hadn’t found out and done our due diligence.”

The Falcon Heavy rocket was the engine for the start of the spacecraft’s long cosmic journey before it separated. The Falcon Heavy’s side boosters landed back at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, causing a sonic boom that can be heard by locals and will be used on future missions.

Once in space, the team will spend three to four months conducting initial checks on the spacecraft and its instruments.

To accomplish the rest of the mission, the small spacecraft will rely on a new solar electric propulsion system, which is powered by solar energy. Hall effect driversOh, he said. The thrusters will use the spacecraft’s large solar arrays and “use electricity to ionize xenon gas and accelerate those charged ions through an electric field to very, very high speeds,” Oh said.

The result: a speed five times faster than the speed of fuel launched in a regular chemical rocket.

The Psyche spacecraft will arrive at Mars in May 2026 and will use the planet’s gravity to effectively direct its path to Psyche. The mission will arrive at the asteroid in late July 2029 and will spend 26 months orbiting the asteroid to map its surface, take images and determine whether Psyche really is a metallic core. The spacecraft will use different orbits around the asteroid, ranging from 440 miles (708 kilometers) away to just 40 miles (64 kilometers) above the surface.

The Psyche mission’s imagers will begin sending data to Earth as soon as the spacecraft detects the asteroid.

Also along for the ride is Demonstration of optical communications technology in deep spaceODSOC. This experiment, which will take place during the first two years of the flight to Psyche, will be NASA’s most distant high-bandwidth laser communications experiment, testing the transmission and reception of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser.

The laser can transmit 10 to 100 times more data than traditional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If the technology demonstration is successful, DSOC could one day be used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.

The spacecraft’s instruments will help scientists determine the asteroid’s chemical and mineralogical composition, topography, mass, gravitational field and rotation. The mission’s magnetometer will attempt to detect evidence of a magnetic field around Psyche, which could indicate that the space rock initially formed as a planetary core.

Psyche, which is dense, is largely composed of iron and nickel, plus something else that may be rock, sulfur or carbon, Elkins-Tanton said.

If Psyche is not a nucleus, it could be a rare object left over from the formation of the solar system that has never been observed.

“The other idea is that Psyche is a kind of primitive, non-molten object that was essentially formed from the first materials in the solar system that came together under gravity and has been preserved in this primitive state ever since,” said Ben Weiss, deputy principal investigator and magnetometer at Psyche. . Driving. Weiss is a professor of planetary science at MIT.

The psyche likely formed near the Sun and then turned metallic over time as oxygen atoms were stripped from iron atoms — a body that has been hypothesized but never found.

The science team is looking forward to seeing the surface features of the asteroid. Radar indicates the presence of two large craters on the surface. But what does a mineral pit look like? Psyche may contain small metal spikes, spiers and even small pieces that resemble a type of mineral sand inside the crater, Elkins-Tanton said. It is also possible that Psyche has experienced volcanic eruptions, creating huge cliffs and greenish-yellow lava flows due to its sulfur content.

“This is our scientifically motivated idea, and it is almost certainly completely wrong,” Elkins-Tanton said. “It will surprise us when we get there. I think there is a very good chance that it will be beyond our wildest imagination, and that is my fondest hope.”