NASA launches spacecraft to a mysterious metal-rich asteroid

When Lindy Elkins-Tanton imagines the metallic asteroid Psyche, she dreams of terrain unlike any seen before. Small craters could look like frozen splashes of water, fringed with silvery spires. Metallic lavas, squeezed out billions of years ago, might shimmer nearby. Gigantic cliff faces, cleaved from the asteroid’s metal crust as it cooled and contracted long ago, might be studded with green crystals of olivine. Whether these vistas exist depends on whether the asteroid, a beguiling 220-kilometer-wide object discovered in 1852, really is the hunk of iron and nickel long assumed by astronomers. Now, Elkins-Tanton and her colleagues are one step closer to finding out, after a $1.2 billion NASA mission to Psyche launched today. “It’s beautifully motivating to be doing a primary kind of exploration to a body that no human has ever seen before,” says Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the mission, also named Psyche, and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Previous missions to asteroids, which represent the leftovers from planet formation, have explored bodies with mostly rocky exteriors. Psyche will be the first to rendezvous with an “M-type” asteroid: a group of unusually reflective and dense asteroids. For decades, scientists have wondered whether Psyche could be the denuded metal core of a larger protoplanet. According to this scenario, some 4.5 billion years ago, the original body grew massive enough that the heat from its g...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news