This August, following tests at the launch site, the probe will voyage to the middle of the solar system to do the first detailed study of a mostly metal asteroid.
exploring ideas about how tiny would-be planets called planetesimals might have formed billions of years ago, and speculated about whether their remnants might still orbit in the asteroid belt. Afterwards, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California approached her. “Would you like to propose a mission to test your hypothesis?” they asked. “My response was, ‘’ because it had never occurred to me to do that,” she says.
The probe is boxy, and about the size of a car, topped by a big saucer-shaped high-gain antenna, which will be used for sending and receiving signals from home. When WIRED visited the clean room in April, those tests were still in progress. A handful of stanchions and a sign that read "Psyche: Journey to a Metal World" kept visitors at a distance from the black and gray craft, where a technician was working on a tube-like transceiver on the bottom.
Elkins-Tanton is pretty sure Psyche’s made up of an alloy of metals like iron and nickel, the same elements found in the cores of the inner planets, including Earth. It also likely holds tiny amounts of copper, and more lucrative metals like platinum, that might one day interest space mining companies.
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