Nasa launches spacecraft to explore 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.Nasa launched on Friday a spacecraft from Florida on its way to Psyche, the largest of the several metal-rich asteroids known in our solar system and believed by scientists to be the remnant core of an ancient protoplanet, offering clues about Earth’s formation."We’re going to learn all kinds of new things, how these things fly through the solar system, and they hit each other and they cause the evolution of what we have today, our solar system,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) chief Bill Nelson said shortly before lift-off at 10.19am Eastern Time (1419 GMT) on a reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.The Psyche probe, folded inside the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, blasted off under partly cloudy skies from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral on a planned journey 2.2bn miles (3.5bn km) through space.The spacecraft, roughly the size of a small van, is due to reach the asteroid in August 2029."We’ve visited either in person or robotically worlds made of rock, worlds made of ice and worlds made of gas ... but this will be our first time visiting a world that has a metal surface,” lead scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton told reporters during a briefing this week.The launch, shown live on Nasa TV, marks the latest in a series of recent Nasa missions seeking insights about the origins of our planet about 4.5bn years ago by sending robotic spacecraft to explore asteroids – primordial relics from the dawn of the solar system.Asteroid Psyche measures roughly 173 miles (279km) across at its widest point and resides on the outer fringes of the main asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.Cargo-faring panels enclosing the spacecraft inside the nose of the rocket’s upper stage were jettisoned about five minutes after launch, and the probe itself was released into space about an hour later.Nasa has said the process for the spacecraft to autonomously unfurl its twin solar panels and to point its communications antennae toward Earth takes around two hours.Mission controllers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles confirmed detection of the probe’s first radio signals shortly after it was seen on live video floating free from the rocket.The JPL team plans to spend the next 3-4 months conducting checks of the spacecraft’s systems before sending it on its deep space journey, propelled by solar-electric ion thrusters being used for the first time on an interplanetary mission.After reaching the asteroid, the spacecraft would then orbit it for 26 months, scanning Psyche with instruments built to measure its gravity, magnetic proprieties and composition.According to the leading hypothesis, the asteroid is the once-molten, long-frozen inner hulk of a baby planet torn apart by collisions with other celestial bodies in the early solar system.It orbits the sun about three times farther than Earth, even at its closest to our planet.The first asteroid of its kind chosen for study at close range by spacecraft, Psyche is believed to consist of iron, nickel, gold and other metals, with a collective hypothetical monetary value placed at 10 quadrillion dollars.However, the mission has nothing to do with space mining, according to scientists.Its objective is to gain greater understanding of the formation of Earth and other rocky planets that are built around cores of molten metal.Earth’s molten centre is too deep and too hot to ever be examined directly."So we say, tongue-in-cheek, that we’re going to outer space to explore inner space,” Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s principal investigator for Nasa’s mission partner Arizona State University, said at Tuesday’s briefing.Upon reaching Psyche, the probe is set to circle it in a series of gradually descending orbits, ending up a mere 40 miles (64km) from the asteroid’s surface, before finishing the mission in November 2031.The asteroid, discovered in 1852 and named for the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology, is the largest of about nine known asteroids that appear from ground-based radar observations to consist largely of metal, with rocky material mixed in.Still, scientists can only guess at what Psyche looks like, Elkins-Tanton said.The spacecraft is programmed to approach Mars in May 2026 for a gravity assist intended to boost its momentum and put its trajectory on course for its final destination.