The mission has already been postponed from this year – but the space agency hopes it will finally take off in 2023. If successful, scientists will gather unique insights into an extraordinary piece of rock located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, known as 16 Psyche. Composed of iron, nickel, and gold, its value would be out of scale in earthly terms, since a four trillion sum amounts to a thousand trillion. For reference, the value of the entire world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is just over £85.6 trillion, according to the World Bank – although given its distance from Earth, there’s no prospect of cashing in any time soon. There’s no name yet for the spacecraft that will make the trip, though it will launch using one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rockets. The plan to launch next October follows a feasibility study and also a separate, independent review, commissioned in June by NASA and the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which investigated the causes of the delay. JUST IN: Rishi Sunak brokered ‘fragile truce’, Tory spokesman warns The new flight profile is similar to the one originally planned for August 2022, using a Mars gravity assist in 2026 to shoot the spacecraft on its way to Psyche. If all goes according to plan, it will arrive in August 2029. NASA describes the mission as “a journey to a unique metallic asteroid” that appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, “one of the building blocks of our solar system.” Because it is impossible to see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers an opportunity to learn more about the history of collisions and accretion that created the terrestrial planets. The mission is managed by Arizona State University with JPL responsible for mission management, operations and navigation. The spacecraft’s solar-electric propulsion frame will be built by Maxar Technologies with a payload that includes an imager, magnetometer and gamma-ray spectrometer. Speaking last year, Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of Arizona, who as principal investigator leads the Psyche mission, said: “If it turns out to be part of a metallic core, it would be part of the first generation of early cores in our own solar system. “But we don’t really know, and we won’t know anything for sure until we get there. “We wanted to ask fundamental questions about the material that formed planets. “We are full of questions and not many answers. This is real exploration.”
