NASA launched its latest venture into outer space on Friday morning, sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche to learn more about the object that has long been a mystery to scientists and to determine what it is made out of.
— NASA October 13, 2023 “We’re really going to see a kind of new object, which means that a lot of our ideas are going to be proven wrong,” Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University who serves as the mission’s principal investigator, told the New York Times on Friday.
Psyche is located approximately 150 million miles from Earth, and the spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in August 2029. The mission was initially intended to start last year, but staffing changes, miscommunication, and issues testing the navigation software that would guide the spacecraft through the solar system caused the craft to miss its launch window.
“It became pretty clear that there’s some component of the surface that’s very radar reflective,” said Dr. Jim Bell, who is also a professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University and part of the mission. “And the simplest way to do that is with metallic fragments.”