The slingshot around Mars was a make-or-break moment for the Psyche asteroid mission. Here's why.
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsNASA's Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars on Friday , diving closer to the Red Planet than either of its tiny moons.
But the precisely timed maneuver was not designed to study Mars,zipped by Mars to use the planet as a celestial slingshot on its journey to its namesake, the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The spacecraft passed within about 2,800 miles of On Friday, Psyche hurtled past the planet at roughly 12,333 mph , according to NASA.
The flyby boosted Psyche's speed and, more importantly, shifted its trajectory toward its destination, theScientists believe the 173-mile-wide space rock may be the exposed metallic core of a shattered protoplanet — a primordial building block of the rocky worlds whose outer crust and mantle were likely stripped away in catastrophic collisions billions of years ago. If so, the mission could offer humanity its first direct glimpse of material normally buried deep inside planets like Earth.
Friday's flyby marked one of the mission's most important milestones, conserving precious fuel while placing the spacecraft on course to reach the asteroid in 2029.. By carefully flying past a moving planet, spacecraft can gain speed, alter direction and conserve propellant, allowing missions to travel farther and faster than rockets alone would permit. The concept can seem almost counterintuitive, as though spacecraft are somehow getting energy for free.
A spacecraft accelerates as it falls toward a planet, then slows again while climbing back out of the planet's gravity well. Intuitively, those gains and losses should cancel each other out. What makes the maneuver possible, however, is not simply the planet's gravity, but the planet's own motion around the sun.carrying enormous momentum as it orbits the sun.
By approaching the planet at a carefully calculated angle and departing in another, Psyche effectively stole a tiny fraction of that orbital energy. — every action has an equal and opposite reaction — as the spacecraft gains momentum by borrowing an infinitesimally small amount from Mars, a transfer imperceptible to the planet but transformative for the mission. Mars as a bright crescent as seen by the Psyche spacecraft just before its Red Planet flyby on May 15, 2026.
"It's smart, it's cheap, and it's phenomenally clever … it's a bit like interplanetary billiards," Shadan Ardalan, a NASA scientist who was involved with the agency's Juno mission to Jupiter, previously Gravity assists have long been used to explore humanity's cosmic backyard. The technique dates back to the dawn of the Space Age in 1959, when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 used the moon's gravity to swing behind it and photograph the lunar far side for the first time.
Many of humanity's most ambitious robotic missions would also have been impossible without such maneuvers. NASA's Voyager probes famously used a once-every-176-years alignment of the outer planets in the late 1970s to, with Voyager 2 continuing onward to Uranus and Neptune in a historic grand tour of the outer solar system.
Cassini relied on gravity assists with Earth, Venus and Jupiter to build up the speed needed to reach Saturn, while New Horizons swung past Jupiter toto arc the crew of four back toward Earth without requiring major engine burns after looping around the lunar far side. On Friday, the Mars encounter gave Psyche the equivalent of roughly a 2-kilometer-per-second change in velocity relative to the sun, according to a, relying on its solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity and slowly push the spacecraft forward by releasing charged xenon gas.
The system is highly efficient, but it generates only a small amount of thrust over long periods of time. Achieving the same boost in speed and shift in trajectory using propulsion alone would have been extraordinarily expensive and likely impractical, requiring enormous amounts of propellant — more than the spacecraft could realistically carry — while also adding weight and dramatically increasing launch costs.
The Mars flyby allowed the spacecraft to use the planet's gravity to do much of the work instead, saving fuel for the rest of the journey. Like a baseball launched off a bat, Psyche now leaves Mars carrying new momentum and a reshaped trajectory, bound for a metallic world that may reveal what lies hidden inside planets themselves. It should arrive at asteroid 16 Psyche in July 2029. Sharmila Kuthunur is an independent space journalist based in Bengaluru, India.
Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Science, Astronomy and Live Science, among other publications. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northeastern University in Boston.
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