It may be 230 million miles (370 million km) away from Earth, but this asteroid could be worth a small fortune.ġ6 Psyche is one of the most mysterious objects in our solar system, and scientists could soon be getting a close-up view thanks to a newly confirmed Nasa mission. 'The early solar system was a violent place, as planetary bodies coalesced and then collided with one another while settling into orbits around the sun,' says Caltech's Katherine de Kleer, assistant professor of planetary science and astronomy.
Psyche is the largest of the M-Type asteroids, an enigmatic class of asteroids that are thought to be metal rich and therefore potentially may be fragments of the cores of proto-planets that broke up as the solar system formed. 'The findings are a step toward resolving the mystery of the origin of this unusual object, which has been thought by some to be a chunk of the core of an ill-fated protoplanet,' according to the study authors. This allowed them to produce the first temperature map of the space rock, providing new insight into its surface properties. Unlike other rocky or icy bodies, Psyche 16 is suspected to be made of mostly iron and nickel, and could be worth quadrillions of dollars in potential mining value.Īhead of the NASA mission, the team from California carried out a close examination of the millimeter-wavelength emissions from the asteroid. Psyche 16 was originally discovered in 1852 and is believed to be the remnants of a protoplanet destroyed by 'hit-and-run collisions' when the solar system was forming. It is hoped this will help NASA in its mission, as it will have a more detailed starting point in its observations. They were able to determine it has a metallic surface made up of at least 30 per cent metal and that the rocks on the surface are peppered with metal grains. Normally, infrared images of a space rock provide a single pixel of data, but using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers were able to get 50 pixel resolution and learn more about the surface of the space rock.
To help in this mission, a new temperature map has been created of Psyche by a team from Caltech in Pasadena, California to provide insight into its surface properties.
NASA is sending a mission to study the metal rich asteroid in 2026 in an effort to determine its origins, with some speculation it was the core of an early planet. Psyche is a 124 mile-wide space rock that orbits the sun in the asteroid belt, a donut-shaped region of space between Mars and Jupiter containing over a million rocks.
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The Psyche asteroid is packed full of precious metals and could be worth more than $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion), new measurements of its surface temperature have confirmed.
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