NASA Launches Psyche, a Mission To Explore a Metal Asteroid (nytimes.com) 24
Is the asteroid Psyche really a hunk of mostly metal? Is the object, which is nearly as wide as Massachusetts, the core of a baby planet whose rocky outer layers were knocked off during a cataclysmic collision in the early days of the solar system? Right now, all that astronomers can say is maybe, maybe not. NASA launched a spacecraft on Friday morning, also named Psyche, on a journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to find out. From a report: "We're really going to see a kind of new object, which means that a lot of our ideas are going to be proven wrong," said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University who serves as the mission's principal investigator.
Being proven wrong, she added, "is, I think, the most exciting thing in science." That voyage in search of answers kicked off Friday at 10:19 a.m. Eastern time. Falcon Heavy, the largest of SpaceX's operational rockets, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the massive spacecraft on a journey that will last about six years and travel billions of miles. Friday's flight overcame early, unfavorable weather forecasts for a seemingly flawless flight. About eight minutes into the flight, the rocket's upper stage entered a 45-minute coasting period during which it will prepare to deploy the spacecraft on its flight away from Earth. The asteroid named Psyche has long been a curious enigma. Spotted in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer, it is named for the Greek goddess of the soul, and it was just the 16th asteroid to be discovered. In the early observations, it was, like the other asteroids, a starlike point of light that moved in an orbit around the sun, and not much more.
Being proven wrong, she added, "is, I think, the most exciting thing in science." That voyage in search of answers kicked off Friday at 10:19 a.m. Eastern time. Falcon Heavy, the largest of SpaceX's operational rockets, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the massive spacecraft on a journey that will last about six years and travel billions of miles. Friday's flight overcame early, unfavorable weather forecasts for a seemingly flawless flight. About eight minutes into the flight, the rocket's upper stage entered a 45-minute coasting period during which it will prepare to deploy the spacecraft on its flight away from Earth. The asteroid named Psyche has long been a curious enigma. Spotted in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer, it is named for the Greek goddess of the soul, and it was just the 16th asteroid to be discovered. In the early observations, it was, like the other asteroids, a starlike point of light that moved in an orbit around the sun, and not much more.
mothership (Score:2)
Metal? It's the mother ship.
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You haven't watched the peer reviewed scientific video journal known as Ancient Aliens? Aliens build stuff with granite.
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You haven't watched the peer reviewed scientific video journal known as Ancient Aliens? Aliens build stuff with granite.
And I hear that aliens cut the cheese using copper chisels!
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I find there is kind of a hype with space currently taking place when we take into account that we seem to have discovered and understood only a small fraction of how our own space rock where we live works, ocean depths, planet core etc.
I guess it's typical current human behavior which I have observed many times in workplace environments.
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It’s worth how much?!? (Score:2)
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I think the plan for the first asteroid capture is more like 'put it in lunar orbit'. Or maybe if they're feeling brave, a high Earth orbit.
Then you figure out how to mine in space and possibly bring home refined chunks.
The amount of delta-v required is well beyond our current capabilities if you want the mission to end within a reasonable amount of time, so it's entirely theoretical at present.
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I think the plan for the first asteroid capture is more like 'put it in lunar orbit'.
Lunar orbits are not stable, so any asteroid there fairly rapidly either fly away or collide with either the Moon or the Earth.
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In a bit of an interesting read after a quick Google...
There are four 'frozen' orbits that are dynamically semi-stable. They bump around due to lunar gravitational anomalies, but stay in the same general path without catastrophic deviation.
There are also the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, but you might consider those to be Earth orbits.
Finally, apparently there's a retrograde high lunar orbital path that is called a distant retrograde orbit, where the orbit is continually corrected by Lagrange point interacti
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To get the necessary delta-v, you'd need to be mining the thing from it's original orbit, and using the mined material and a solar-powered mass driver of some sort to throw some of the mined material away to produce the required delta-v. Whether that's throwing stuff away magnetically (iron-ish) or electrically (ionised "volatiles") is an unanswered question at the moment. Perhaps both, to maximise us
Re:It’s worth how much?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is 140 miles across and masses an estimated 22,900,000,000,000,000 metric tons. That's 22.9 quadrillion metric tons. There is no 'landing' that anywhere. There's nothing that could support that weight on Earth, and it's massive enough that it causes perturbations in the trajectories of other asteroids in its vicinity.
If it is mostly metal, it would so dwarf all of the artificial material that humanity has ever produced by several orders of magnitude. In 2020 National Geographic had estimated that for the entire history of humanity's creative efforts making things, we had finally exceeded the total mass in artificial things of all natural biological life. That total mass is approximately 55,000,000,000 (55 billion) metric tons. This means that if this metallic asteroid is all metal, it's more than 400,000 times more material than the total sum of all stuff manufactured by humanity, including concrete, wood, and and other constructions, not just humanity's use of metal.
If there's any use for this asteroid's materials, it will be far in humanity's future, when we are using the resources of our star system on a system-wide scale, not to bring it back to Earth in any significant quantity. I could see it being used to manufacture space-based machinery, components for spacecraft and artificial habitats, that sort of thing. Very little would come back to Earth, and likely if it did it would be in the form of components on spacecraft that traverse the solar system.
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> There is no 'landing' that anywhere. There's nothing that could support that weight on Earth
Let's test at Mar-a-Lago anyhow. It supports other heavy objects.
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There is no 'landing' that anywhere.
just don’t look up.
Metal spectral oddity (Score:2)
I've read they are not sure what mix of metals this rock has. The assumption of metals is due to density, brightness, and lack of a spectrum. Spectroscopy allegedly doesn't work on most metals. Does anybody know why? The probe has some weird-ass instruments to work around that, using frequencies normally blocked by Earth's atmosphere.
Gonna be an interesting mission.
Seems "Spectroscopy" is pronounced "Spek-trAHskuspee" according to howjsay.com. So now you can sound Leet Nerd.
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The available data (mass, volume, reflection spectrum) does not uniquely give a solution for %lower_density_material, %higher_density_material and %void_space. Even if you assume %void_space=0 (quite unlikely) and that there is only one type of low-density material (also unlikely ; examined asteroids and meteorites make "ices", phyllosilicates, feldspars, pyroxenes and olivines all reasonable options, all of which have a range of densities) and th
This has great potential (Score:2)
I wish they had sent a lander though. I also heard that the camera isn't very new because the mission kept getting delayed. After this, we need to send a flotilla to reach Halley's Comet before it starts emitting its tail. I think a few landers on Halley's Comet would be cool.
Massachusetts (Score:5, Insightful)
How wide is Massachusetts? Its on the other side of the world. I did visit Boston once, but never drove to the border, let alone noted the distance.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of standard measure of distance, so we could all understand it, without being familiar with geography of distant realms?
Then writers could describe an asteroids's size in those units. Unless of course they assumed we were all complete morons who could not comprehend such an abstract thing.
If it turns out NOT to have metal (Score:1)
...will NASA say "psych!"?
Everyone is talking about mining opportunities, but being closer to Earth is probably more important to early mining operations than size.
There are other metallic asteroids, [wikipedia.org] which come closer to Earth, but I haven't found proximity data yet. (I'll give you a Bing Award if you find such.)
NASA is probably studying this one first because it may be an almost-complete left-over core of a planet. See, they put science over finance! (mining exploration). Not everything in the US is dollar
Alternate sources (Score:3)
NASA launch livestream on youtube [youtube.com]
NASA press release of the successful launch [nasa.gov]
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Thanks, good reading. I cribbed the excellent summary from the blog:
Psyche mission controllers on Earth have received full acquisition of signal from the spacecraft, and the solar arrays are fully deployed. The spacecraft will be propelled by solar electric propulsion. The five-panel, cross-shaped solar arrays provide around 800 square feet of solar collecting surface and make the spacecraft about the size of a singles tennis court when fully deployed.
The solar arrays will produce more than 20 kilowatts of
Arrrgh, that misleading simile again! (Score:4, Informative)
An extremely baby planet, since the whole asteroid belt adds up to about 1% of the mass of the Moon. and 16_Psyche has less than 1% of the mass of the asteroid belt. In human terms, this "baby planet" would have weighed less than 10 grammes (whatever that is in American - a third of an ounce or so?)
In the early years of the Solar system, the presence of significant amounts of aluminium-26, which decayed radioactively to magnesium-26 (and a positron, a neutrino and a gamma ray) allowing the melting of much smaller bodies than in the later Solar system (e.g. today).
At about 220km mean diameter, Psyche may have been the core of a 1_Ceres-sized body, or something smaller. How much of an insulating "blanket" of heat-producing aluminosilicate minerals there was over the core is hard to estimate, because the rate of heat production by Al-26 decay varies a lot with time. It may also be the re-aggregated debris of a thoroughly disrupted body.
With a bulk density of just under 4 tonnes per cubic metre, Psyche cannot be pure metal (except aluminium or lithium, which are chemically unfeasible). It could be about 50% nickel-iron and 50% feldspar minerals. Or about 25% nickel-iron and 75% magnesium-iron silicate minerals. If it's a re-aggregated rubble pile, there could be significant void space as well, which makes the range of plausible compositions wider. But what it is not is a solid lump of nickel-iron.
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Baby? Metal?
I've got your BABYMETAL for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]