TIME.CO, Jakarta – NASA launched a spacecraft from Florida on Friday 13 October 2023 en route to Psyche, asteroid The largest of several metal-rich asteroids known in our solar system and believed by scientists to be the remaining core of an ancient protoplanet, providing clues to the formation of Earth.
The Psyche spacecraft, folded inside the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, launched under partly cloudy skies from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on a planned journey of 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km) through space. The spacecraft, about the size of a small van, will reach the asteroid in August 2029.
The launch, broadcast live on NASA TV, marked the latest in a series of recent NASA missions seeking information about the origins of our planet some 4.5 billion years ago, sending robotic spacecraft to explore asteroids , primordial relics of the beginning of the solar era. system.
Asteroid Psyche measures approximately 173 miles (279 km) at its widest point and is located on the outer edge of the main asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
The JPL team plans to spend the next three to four months checking the spacecraft’s systems before sending it on its spacewalk, powered by a solar-powered electric ion thruster used for the first time on an interplanetary mission.
After reaching the asteroid, the spacecraft will orbit it for 26 months, scanning Psyche with instruments built to measure its gravity, magnetic properties and composition.
According to the main hypothesis, asteroids are the interior of small planets that were once melted, frozen and torn apart by collisions with other celestial bodies in the early days of the solar system. It orbits the Sun about three times farther than Earth, even at its closest point to our planet.
Psyche, the first asteroid of its kind selected for close-up study by a spacecraft, is believed to be composed primarily of iron, nickel, gold and other metals, with a hypothetical collective monetary value set at 10 quadrillion dollars.
But according to scientists, the mission has nothing to do with space mining. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the formation of Earth and other rocky planets built around liquid metal cores. The Earth’s liquid center is too deep and too hot to study directly.
“So we’re saying, in no uncertain terms, that we’re going to go into space to explore deep space,” Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche principal investigator for Arizona State University, NASA’s mission partner, said in a briefing to reporters Tuesday.
Announcement
After reaching Psyche, the probe will circle it in a series of gradually descending orbits, ending just 40 miles (64 km) from the asteroid’s surface, before completing its mission in November 2031.
The asteroid, discovered in 1852 and named after the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology, is the largest of about nine known asteroids, based on ground-based radar observations, composed mostly of metal, with a mix of rocky material. guess what Psyche looks like, says Elkins-Tanton.
The spacecraft is scheduled to approach Mars in May 2026 for gravitational assistance intended to boost its momentum and put its trajectory back on track toward its final destination.
Other spaceflight milestones set for the mission include a technology demonstration that tested a laser-based communications system to send high-bandwidth data to Earth from beyond the moon for the first time.
It also marked NASA’s first launch with a Falcon Heavy rocket equipped by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and the first interplanetary mission flown by a Falcon Heavy.
The launch comes two weeks after NASA successfully returned to Earth the largest sample of material ever collected from the surface of an asteroid: the rocky near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
NASA in 2021 it launched a spacecraft called Lucy on a 12-year expedition to study Trojan asteroids, two large groups of space rocks orbiting the Sun ahead of and behind Jupiter’s path. Last September, NASA sent a spacecraft to hit an asteroid with enough force to push it off its natural path – the first time humans have changed the motion of a celestial body – in a successful test of a planetary defense system.
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