Featured Image Credit: NASA/Buradaki/Getty Images
Ellie Kemp
NASA is investigating an asteroid worth one hundred quintillion dollars for one very specific reason.
Back in October 2023, the space agency began its Psyche mission and launched a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to go and probe 16 Psyche, one of the largest discovered M-type asteroids.
Most asteroids we know of are made up of rock and ice - but this one is pretty special.
The asteroid has an estimated surface area of 64,000 square miles (165,800 square km), making it almost the size of Tunisia which has a total area of 63,170 square miles.
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However, 16 Psyche is believed to be made up of up to 60 percent of iron and nickel - lucrative metals which could hypothetically make everyone on Earth a billionaire.
Anyway, the spacecraft is set to travel a total of 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km) to its destination, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Despite traveling at 124,000 mph, the Psyche craft is still pretty far off from its target.
Psyche is set to conduct a 'gravity assist maneuver' at Mars next year before heading onwards to the asteroid - but it won't get there until 2029.
Rather than landing on 16 Psyche, the spacecraft will instead orbit it for 917 days, from August 5 2029 to October 31 2031.
Once in orbit, the spacecraft is set to map and study Psyche in a number of different ways, hopefully providing scientists with new data on the extraordinary asteroid.
A multispectral imager will be among the tools employed, which captures image data within specific wavelength ranges across the electromagnetic spectrum.
A gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer, and a radio instrument for gravity measurement will also be used.
The mission’s goal is, 'among other things,' to 'determine whether Psyche is indeed the core of a planetesimal,' NASA explained.
A planetesimal is 'a minute planet' which could 'come together with many others under gravitation to form a planet.'
Findings could also shed light on how our very own planet Earth started life, too.
As NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab explains: "Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets - including Earth - scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets' rocky mantles and crusts.
"Because we cannot see or measure Earth's core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets."