Just off a tree-covered side road past businesses selling boats and fishing gear sits a fenced-off building that's home to a $700 million satellite nearly ready for launch. Its mission: To study the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, which scientists suspect could mirror the inner core of Earth and other planets in the solar system.
at Kennedy Space Center. But after missing a chance to launch in 2022, NASA parked it at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility across the river where it has been sitting in the center of the stark, white clean room.installed this month, teams are finally set to load it with the fuel needed to send it on its 2.5-billion-mile trip to the asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
"One of the key characteristics of our Earth is the metal core, which gives us our magnetic field, which shields our atmosphere and all the other great things the magnetic field does for us, including giving us auroras and the beautiful night sky," she said."And it's long been humans' dream to go to the metal core of our Earth. I mean, ask Jules Verne.
"We visited bodies that are made of rock, rocky asteroids. We visited icy asteroids. We've looked at comets. And the last characteristic, the last kind of category of object that we've never visited as a species in ourThe asteroid was first discovered on March 17, 1852, by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, named for the Greek goddess of the soul who in mythology was born human, but married the Greek god of love Eros, aka Cupid.
Psyche was supposed to launch in 2022, but issues that came to light with management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory forced a very public delay along with an independent review of where the project went wrong. The delay of launch by more than a year was exponentially compounding the life of the mission because of Earth's relative place in the solar system to where Psyche orbits.
NASA is also hitching a ride to test out near-infrared-laser-based optical communication back to Earth during the first two years of the probe's trip before it reaches Mars for a gravity-assist swing on its way to the asteroid belt. NASA's hoping to prove out technology that will be needed for future missions to Mars.
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