Say hello to “16 Psyche”. You may have heard a lot about this Asteroid 226 km wide In the coming months NASA In August 2022, approaching the launch of a project of the same name, reads what it became.
Iron? Nickel? Gold? Observations made so far suggest one of their predictions that this asteroid will form It is technically worth about US $ 10,000 trillion. This is much higher than the $ 84.5 trillion world economy by 2020. Stadista (A few trillion less than 2019).
Whatever its perceived value, the metallic ‘16 Psyche ’is a heavenly rarity. It is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is three times farther from the Sun than the Earth and was first discovered in 1852.
It is one-sixteenth the diameter of our moon, But this is arguably the most intriguing. The soul is believed to be the center of the exposed iron, nickel and metal gold Molecules. Most asteroids are rocks or ice.
“If it became part of a metal nucleus, it would be part of the first generation of early atoms in our solar system,” said Lindy Elkins-Tandon of Arizona State University, who is also the lead researcher. “But we don’t really know, we don’t know anything until we get there. We’re full of questions, not many answers. This is a real study.”
Studying the asteroid from a distance is an impossible task. The Hubble Space Telescope does not know many details. However, from radar data, scientists know that it is shaped like a potato. And it turns sideways.
NASA’s mission is to spend at least 21 months mapping and studying the properties of an asteroid at a distance of 700 kilometers from the asteroid’s surface. The board will have a payload set, which will have a magnetometer to measure any magnetic field, as well as imagers to capture and map the surface.
Meanwhile, spectrometers measure the gamma rays and neutrons emitted from it to tell what the surface is made of.
NASA’s Psych Mission is part of its Discovery program’s low-cost robotic space missions. The Psych Orbiter will be launched in August 2022, Nine months later it will cross Mars for gravity assistance and finally reach the asteroid in January 2026.
“We don’t know what we’ve going to find,” Elkins-Tandon said. “I hope we are totally surprised.”
* With information Forbes U.S..
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