Forbes | NASA is preparing to explore a world made of metal. Confirming that the
exciting Arizona State University School of Earth and Space
Exploration-led Psyche mission
is now entering the build phase, NASA’s probe is now set to visit a
mysterious asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It could be
nothing less than the exposed core of a dead planet, with some
suggesting that it could be worth a staggering $10,000 quadrillion.
What is asteroid Psyche?
While most asteroids are rocky or icy bodies, Psyche is thought to be
a stripped planetary core, a very rare object in the solar system.
While NASA missions like InSight drill into Mars
to discover the origins of planets, Psyche offers an opportunity to
inspect and study a planetary core up close. It appears to be the
exposed iron-nickel core (just like Earth’s) of a proto-planet, a small
world that formed early in the solar system's history, but never reached
planetary size—much like Vesta and Ceres, which NASA's Dawn spacecraft explored.
Could asteroid Psyche be the heart of an early planet as big as Mars
that lost its rocky outer layers? Was it involved in violent collisions?
NASA will help planetary scientists find out, and so tease-out lessons
for how the solar system’s planets likely formed.
