The asteroid that a NASA spacecraft is about to approach is called Psyche. Considered a valuable resource, the Psyche asteroid holds vast amounts of gold and diamonds, worth 70,000 times the world’s economy.
Discovered in 1852 by Italian scientist Annibale de Gasparis, the asteroid was named after a Greek goddess.
NASA revealed that the mission to Psyche will take place at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in October on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX won $117 million in launch contracts in 2020.
NASA’s website says the rocket will fly for about three and a half years before reaching the asteroid Psyche. The spacecraft will then spend 21 months learning about the massive asteroid, which NASA hopes will allow them to learn more about its structure and history.
Psyche is one of the largest asteroids in the solar system, with an average diameter of 220 kilometers. This massive asteroid is located in the asteroid belt, which accounts for 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, and is presumed to be the core of an ancient planet.
The belt consists of approximately 1.1-1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 km and millions of other smaller asteroids.
However, it is not Psyche’s size that scientists are most interested in, but rather the abundance of metals and the asteroid’s origin. Believed to contain iron, nickel and gold, it is worth an estimated $10 billion, roughly 70,000 times the size of the global economy.
The Psyche asteroid is rich in gold, estimated to be worth 70,000 times the world’s economy. (Photo: NASA)
“If Psyche contains significant amounts of iron, nickel and gold, then other planets are mainly made of rock and ice. This suggests that it may be the remnant core of a protoplanet that formed billions of years ago.” – Quoted in the Daily Star The words of the scientists.
Not only does it want to learn more about asteroid Psyche, NASA plans to test new deep-space communication technologies. NASA says this could be aimed at transmitting information through space more efficiently than existing technologies.
