SpaceX Wins NASA Contract to Launch a Spacecraft to an Asteroid Beyond Mars (teslarati.com) 41
An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati:
SpaceX has been awarded a $117 million launch contract for NASA's Psyche mission that will study a unique metal asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. The NASA mission to loft a 5,750-lb. (2,608-kg) spacecraft atop of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket will study a mineral-rich asteroid named 16 Psyche. The mission is expected to take place sometime in 2022 and launch from NASA's historic Launch Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Psyche is an intriguing, metallic world orbiting in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Most asteroids are made of rock and ice, but not Psyche — it's composed of iron and nickel. That's what makes it an interesting target. Scientists want to study it because they believe Psyche could provide insight into how planets form. Terrestrial bodies, like the Earth, have metallic cores deep in their interior, below the outer layers like the mantle and crust. Psyche could be one of these metallic cores: the remnant of a violent collision with another planetary body billions of years ago. We're unable to study the Earth's core directly, so Psyche could provide a lot of insight into our own planet as well as how other rocky planets form...
This mission is one of true exploration because scientists aren't exactly sure of what we will find. Ground-based measurements indicate that Psyche could be as large as Mars, and is probably shaped like a potato. But is this hunk of metal the dead, exposed heart of an ancient protoplanet or could it be a weird iron-rich alien world....?
This is SpaceX's 8th contract from NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP) and the first for Falcon Heavy.
NASA has shared a terrific animation showing what the asteroid will look like.
Psyche is an intriguing, metallic world orbiting in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Most asteroids are made of rock and ice, but not Psyche — it's composed of iron and nickel. That's what makes it an interesting target. Scientists want to study it because they believe Psyche could provide insight into how planets form. Terrestrial bodies, like the Earth, have metallic cores deep in their interior, below the outer layers like the mantle and crust. Psyche could be one of these metallic cores: the remnant of a violent collision with another planetary body billions of years ago. We're unable to study the Earth's core directly, so Psyche could provide a lot of insight into our own planet as well as how other rocky planets form...
This mission is one of true exploration because scientists aren't exactly sure of what we will find. Ground-based measurements indicate that Psyche could be as large as Mars, and is probably shaped like a potato. But is this hunk of metal the dead, exposed heart of an ancient protoplanet or could it be a weird iron-rich alien world....?
This is SpaceX's 8th contract from NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP) and the first for Falcon Heavy.
NASA has shared a terrific animation showing what the asteroid will look like.
just no (Score:5, Insightful)
"Psyche could be as large as Mars"
No.
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Re:just no (Score:5, Informative)
Psyche could be the core of a planet that was as large as Mars before the rest of the planet was stripped away from it. This is the correct hypothesis.
See here for a more serious article saying just this. The article is directly from a NASA site and better overall than the article Slashdot linked.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/a... [nasa.gov]
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Better than the article.... (Score:2)
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I've seen Psyche described as "as large as Massachusetts" which might perhaps be the source of the error.
Re:just no (Score:4, Funny)
I've seen Psyche described as "as large as Massachusetts" which might perhaps be the source of the error.
Oh, they must have meant "Mahs"
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Private space contractors... (Score:2)
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Insurance make no sense at all (Score:3)
esp. for the taxpayer.
Insurance only makes sense for private entities to avoid bankruptcy or to save you standard of living. It's for losses one cannot afford to take so you're willing to pay a premium higher than the risk to cover yourself. For everyone else, insurance makes as much sense as for a billionaire playing the lottery.
The US has a federal budget of about 4.5 trillion $ and is (probably) the largest economic entity in the world. Buying insurance for 0.0025% of this would be plain stupid and an ut
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I, as a taxpayer would want my costs covered in case of an accident.
Who do you think really pays for car accidents, the insurance company or the car owners? It's just that one car owner can't cover all the costs of a major accident, so they all pay a little into a pool and the insurance company makes a few big pay-outs and keeps the rest as profit. It's the same with satellite owners too, they're always paying for it in the end. The government has just decided they're big enough to be a pool of one and eat their losses without lining an insurance company's pockets, as far a
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"Will SpaceX be required to cover the costs of the satellite or other equipment in case of failure to deploy payload as agreed? Who would insure this?"
If your Google is broken again, here's the WIkipedia link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Do you make a fuss when your taxes are used to pay Boeing 10x more for the same thing?
Rectangular array of solar cells (Score:2)
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The width of the array looks like it's about the same as the core of the probe. That would be convenient for packing it into the fairing.
The extra rotational inertia might be a benefit. It would tend to produce a more stable platform.
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>Wouldn't a wider and shorter (perhaps fan-shaped) arrangement mean that there would be less torque during maneuvers?
Yes, but it's unlikely to be an issue - in general satellites and space probes make only tiny adjustments and the forces involved are correspondingly tiny - unfolding the array is likely to be the greatest post-launch stress the arms ever experience. Greater rotational inertia can even be an advantage since it means that "noise" from propulsive adjustments has a smaller rotational effect.
What about an asteroid with lotsa platinum? (Score:2)
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Not a problem. Coming down is cheap and easy. Heck, there's even a specialized flour paste that was developed as a wonderfully cheap single-use ablative heat shield.
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Re: What about an asteroid with lotsa platinum? (Score:2)
There's very little chance of us being around when the moon crosses the Roche limit, breaks apart and all the small chunks crash back into the planet, for example.
The moon is receding from the earth. Why would the Roche limit ever become an issue?
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You've got it ass-backwards. You can't build an O'Neil-type rotating station without an enormous amount of raw material, and for that you need a moon base to put the stuff in orbit. A space elevator or mass driver is perfectly practical for the Moon, even if they're not for Earth. Even if you just want to do solar power satellites you need a moon base, since again you can't be dragging all of that mass out of Earth's gravity well and atmosphere.
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Supporting evidence? Every single serious study on the topic since the 1960s have come to the same conclusion; it's way too much frelling mass to launch off Earth's surface. Asteroids are possible sources of building materials, but they're considerably more difficult to reach and at least in the early stages of refining and building a lot of human interaction and troubleshooting is going to be necessary. Additionally most of our mining and refining techniques rely on gravity to one extent or another on g
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Solar power satellites don't need to be particularly massive. The panels can be thin film and frameless. They can have a high circuit voltage to minimize wiring mass. The transmitting antenna array can be made out of foil.
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This kind of stuff is so much cheaper than any manned space programme that it really isn't competing with it. Also, any manned presence in space will certainly be supported .by robots (for example the automated cargo flights that currently go to and from ISS) so experience with robotic missions is not wasted. We also learn more each time about how to build, propel, communicate with, etc., machinery in space, all of which is valuable engineering knowledge. Indepdendently, we get done that proportion of the
It's not an asteroid, it's a space station (Score:4, Funny)
Also (Score:2)
Looks like a good place to locate the home of the Belters [fandom.com].
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It's a tough choice with Ceres. Psyche has the metal - it's likely to be an early and very profitable target for mining, and people will follow the money (presumably mostly maintenance folk and troubleshooters for mostly autonomous mining systems)
When we get to the point of actually homesteading in space though, we're going to want lots of raw material for an ecology - water, carbon, etc. Ceres is the go-to place for that in the belt. Of course you could also harvest minor asteroids as needed, but Ceres h
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Actually, Psyche means that there ARE no "Belters" (Score:2)
I was so taken with the description of 16 Psyche being (close enough to) pure metal that I did a whole essay on it. It's about the whole "Belters" SF trope - started with a bunch of 60s-ish SF writers, most notably Robert Heinlein's "Rolling Stones", Poul Anderson's "Tales of the Flying Mountains", and of course Larry Niven. These created an already-existing trope needing no explanation when "The Expanse" came along.
16 Psyche shows it will Never Happen.
That is, there's no need for this "lonely prospector
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