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Psyche spaceship NASA orbiting the asteroid Psyche soon scheduled to launch. NASA recently showed off a search plane do asteroid this to the public.
Currently, the engineer team is polishing the finishing touches on the Psyche plane which will be launched into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States (US) in August. The Psyche spacecraft will head for the metal-rich asteroid of the same name.
The spaceship will fly to Mars for gravitational relief in May 2023, and in early 2026, orbiting around asteroid 16 Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Scientists think the asteroid, which is about 280km away at its widest point, is estimated to be full of precious metal worth USD 10,000 quadrillion. That’s why, asteroid Psyche known as the treasure asteroid.
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Foto: NASA/JPL-Caltech– |
Quoted from the Daily Mail, researchers from Brown University and Purdue University believe that the asteroid may actually be harder, because the way its gravity attracts objects around it suggests Psyche is much denser than a giant lump of iron.
NASA hopes its Psyche mission will be able to confirm this and determine the asteroid’s true origin. The US space agency believes that space rock is composed mostly of metal from the planetesimal core, one of the building blocks of the rocky planets in our Solar System, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
If so, this research could provide an opportunity to study how planets like ours formed. Scientists believe that rocky planets have a solid metal core in the center of magma beneath their surface. But because they lie so deep beneath the planet’s mantle and crust, they are difficult to measure and study directly. Experts hope Psyche would open up the possibility, because they believe the asteroid was actually the open core of an early planet.
Watch Videos “Watching NASA Prepare to Visit Metal Asteroids“
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