NASA on Tuesday announced that it had entered the final stages of testing for the spacecraft which the agency has designed to explore an asteroid thought to be the core of a failed planet and is worth more than the entire world economy.
After the delivery of a major component, NASA's Psyche spacecraft is now in the phase of "assembly, test, and launch operations" in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California said the agency.
The craft will be tested and checked extensively before being shipped to Cape Canaveral in Florida where it is destined for an August 2022 launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
The spacecraft's mission is to reach and explore Asteroid Psyche, also called 16 Psyche, after which it was named. The asteroid which has a diameter of 226 kilometers (140 miles) wide, is thought to be the core of an early planet that failed to form during its development.
The craft is expected to reach the asteroid, which orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter about 370 million kilometers from Earth, in 2026.
The exact worth of Asteroid Psyche is estimated to be around a jaw-dropping $10,000 quadrillion. The metal-rich asteroid consisting largely of iron and nickel, "could lend valuable insight into how Earth and other planets formed," according to NASA.
The flying space rock was first discovered back in 1852 and was named 16 Psyche after the Greek goddess of the soul and for being the 16th asteroid discovered. In November of last year, NASA's Hubble Telescope finally offered the citizens of Earth a closer glimpse.
"Seeing this big spacecraft chassis arrive at JPL from Maxar is among the most thrilling of the milestones we’ve experienced on what has already been a 10-year journey," said Arizona State University’s Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who as principal investigator leads the Psyche mission.
"Building this complex, precision piece of engineering during the year of COVID is absolutely a triumph of human determination and excellence," he told NASA.
The craft which Maxar Technologies’ team in Palo Alto, California helped create, will be fully assembled and shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center by next spring. It will fly by Mars for a gravity assist in May 2023 and is projected to go into orbit around the asteroid in early 2026, where it will spend 21 months gathering science data.
Meanwhile, on the subject of asteroids, NASA also has given Earth the all-clear for the next century from a particularly menacing asteroid last week, reported The Associated Press (AP).
The space agency announced that new telescope observations have ruled out any chance of Apophis smacking Earth in 2068. That’s the same 340-meter (1,100-foot) space rock that was supposed to come frighteningly close in 2029 and again in 2036.
NASA ruled out any chance of a strike during those two close approaches a while ago. However, a potential 2068 collision still loomed.
"A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility anymore, and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years," Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in a statement Friday.
Scientists were able to refine Apophis' orbit around the sun thanks to radar observations earlier this month when the asteroid passed within 17 million kilometers. Apophis will come within 32,000 kilometers on April 13, 2029, enabling astronomers to get a good look.
"When I started working with asteroids after college, Apophis was the poster child for hazardous asteroids," Farnocchia said. "There’s a certain sense of satisfaction to see it removed from the risk list."
In other exciting space news, the astronomers who gave the world its first true glimpse of a black hole recently captured the polarized light swirling around the same star-eating monster’s magnetic fields in another another landmark image. It provides yet another stunning view while advancing our knowledge of the darkness.