Psyche: NASA launches mission towards metallic asteroid – 10/13/2023 – Science

NASA (American space agency) began this Friday (13) the Psyche mission, its first attempt to reach a metallic asteroid.

At 11:19 am (Brasília time), a Falcon Heavy rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the spacecraft. Eight minutes later, the SpaceX rocket’s side thrusters landed successfully in the company’s landing zones 1 and 2, at Cape Canaveral, and Psyche headed to its destination.

The mission targets the asteroid Psyche, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has a bold intention. For scientists, visiting a metallic asteroid is the closest one can come to traveling to the center of the Earth itself. The Psyche spacecraft is expected to reach the target in 2029.

Initially, the launch was scheduled for this Thursday (12), but had to be rescheduled due to bad weather. Weather conditions, however, were not the only ones that postponed the mission.

Such as Sheet said, Psyche was originally going to fly last year, but problems with testing the flight control system prevented takeoff. As a result, arrival at the asteroid was postponed by at least three years, from 2026 to August 2029.

The prolonged wait is due to the fact that the relative positions of Earth and Mars have changed significantly since 2022, altering the moment in which the red planet’s gravity will be used to propel the spacecraft into Psyche’s orbit. In other words, Psyche will need to wait longer in space to get the “push.”

Journey to the core

The asteroid Psyche was the 16th discovered in the asteroid belt, in 1852, by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis and its name is a tribute to the deity that personifies the soul in Greek mythology.

With an irregular shape and 280 km in diameter on its longest axis, it is much denser than the average asteroid and has between 30% and 60% of its composition in metals.

This atypical constitution — asteroids are mostly made up of rocks — suggests that Psyche could be the exposed core of a planetesimal, as the small celestial bodies are called that appeared in the nebula that created the Solar System, around 4.5 billion years ago. .

The idea is that it was hit by many impacts that ejected much of its outer, rocky layer, leaving only the dense core. “The mission will improve our knowledge of iron cores, a previously unexplored component of planetary formation,” says NASA.

The spacecraft has a magnetometer, a neutron and gamma ray spectrometer and an imager, and will spend about two years orbiting the asteroid to map its surface and collect data on its composition.

Psyche also has DSOC, or Deep Space Optical Communications. It is NASA’s first attempt to develop a system that allows broadband transmissions using lasers instead of radios for operations beyond the Earth-Moon system.

“Radio frequency communications tested in deep space are close to their bandwidth limit, increasing the need for updated communications systems,” NASA says. Expanding capacity will be fundamental in future space missions that generate large volumes of data, including high-definition images and videos.

From asteroids to Earth

The Psyche mission is not the only one that focuses on studying asteroids dating back to the beginning of the Solar System to understand how our planet and its neighbors were formed.

Last Wednesday (11), NASA released the results of initial analyzes of the sample from the asteroid Bennu, collected in space and brought to Earth at the end of September. According to the agency, the material contains clay minerals containing water and a high carbon content, fundamental elements for the emergence of living beings.

“Missions like Osiris-Rex will improve our understanding of asteroids that could threaten Earth, while also giving us a glimpse of what lies beyond. The sample has returned to Earth, but there is still a lot of science to come – science like never before we’ve seen before”, commented the space agency’s administrator, former senator Bill Nelson, at the time.