54321 Engine ignition.
A NASA spacecraft named Psyche,
embarking on a 2.2 billion mile journey.
That's 3.6 billion kilometers over the next six years.
The destination? A metal rich asteroid named 16 Psyche that
orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
The asteroid, whose diameter is roughly the length of Massachusetts,
will be the first metal space object that humans have
ever visited.
Scientists hypothesized that Psyche was formed when a rocky planet
lost its surface after colliding with other bodies,
exposing the metallic core.
One could almost call Psyches mission a journey to the
center of the Earth even though it's in outer space.
Since humans can't drill a path to Earth's core,
asteroids like Psyche may be our only chance to visit
something like it.
So we're going to learn about when we get to
Psyche,
a previously unstudied ingredient that went into making our habitable
Earth,
and that is the metal that is now in the
earths core and the cores of all of the rocky
planets.
Cores that we can never visit but course that we
want to learn about.
The Psyche spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid.
2029 and during its six year journey,
it'll first cruise through interplanetary space for several years,
then slingshot from Mars into the asteroid belt before arriving
at Psyche.
It'll then orbit the asteroid for more than two years,
taking images, mapping and studying the metallic object.
The metal on Psyche is estimated to be worth as
much as 10 quintillion dollars.
But the scientists who came up with that value points
out the number is somewhat meaningless.
They say we were able to actually bring psyche back
then it would flood the metals market and it would
literally be worth nothing.