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See NASA’s Stunning New Images of Mars Captured During an Asteroid-Bound Spacecraft’s Strategic Flyby
The Psyche mission, on its way to study an asteroid of the same name, approached within 2,864 miles of the red planet on May 15
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En route to the largest known metallic asteroid in our solar system, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just got a boost from Mars—and a rare look at the red planet.
Psyche, a mission that will study a space rock of the same name, made its closest approach to Mars on May 15, passing within 2,864 miles of its rocky surface. The maneuver used the planet’s gravity to ramp up the spacecraft’s speed by 1,000 miles per hour without using any onboard propellant, and it put Psyche on the right trajectory to reach its target.
“We are now on course for arrival at the asteroid Psyche in summer 2029,” Don Han, the mission’s navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says in a statement.
Quick fact: Launch of the Psyche mission
The Psyche spacecraft launched on October 13, 2023, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will study the Psyche asteroid to determine whether it is really a planetary building block called a planetesimal, as astronomers suspect, and whether it might shed light on how Earth’s core formed.
Psyche lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and according to NASA, it’s “one of the most intriguing objects” there. The potato-shaped rock is about 173 miles across at its widest point, and it’s thought to be rich in metals and silicates. About 30 to 60 percent of the asteroid is metal, and a significant amount of that metal might come from the core of a planetesimal—one of the building blocks of planets that were common in our early solar system.
The asteroid likely survived lots of collisions as our solar system shaped up around it, so studying Psyche could reveal to astronomers how the cores of Earth and the other rocky planets formed. Alongside other objectives, the Psyche mission hopes to determine whether the asteroid really is a planetesimal’s core. It will spend about two years in orbit around the asteroid, mapping it out and studying its composition.
While the gravity assist was the main point of the Mars flyby, the Psyche spacecraft also captured thousands of images. Those photographs—and the chance they offered to test and calibrate Psyche’s scientific instruments—was “the icing on the cake,” of the whole endeavor, as Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement before the flyby.
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From the spacecraft’s perspective, the red planet was lit up as a crescent as it approached, offering a dramatic target for photography. Essentially, the Psyche mission was “catching up with the planet from its night side, with only a sliver of sunlight” illuminating its surface, as Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, said in the same statement.
As Psyche flew by Mars, other Martian spacecraft collected data for comparison, so that NASA scientists could see whether Psyche’s data matched and calibrate its instruments if it didn’t. These included NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express.
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Magnetometers on the Psyche spacecraft might have caught a phenomenon called “bow shock,” a shock wave caused by the solar wind around the planet. Psyche was also expected to do a “satellite search” around Mars—scanning the area for orbiting objects. That exercise is practice for when it arrives at its asteroid target, since the spacecraft will look for moonlets in the area surrounding Psyche. The spacecraft also imaged Martian craters and got a clear shot of a water ice cap near the planet’s south pole.
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After this action-packed flyby, the spacecraft is now expected to spend three years traveling the rest of the way to its destination. For now, though, it’s keeping the red planet in its rearview.
The flyby provided “unique and important opportunities” to test Psyche’s cameras and image processing, Bell says in the recent statement. “We’ll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance.”