NASA is sending a space probe to study 16 Psyche, a space object dubbed the ‘Golden Asteroid.’ It’s worth an estimated $10 quintillion, or $10,000 quadrillion. That’s a 1 with 19 zeros after it. Basically, if we could sell the thing, it would be enough to give every person on the planet a little over $1.2 billion.
Psyche is an M-Type asteroid, meaning it’s made of metal. The scientific consensus is Psyche is composed almost entirely of iron, nickel, or gold.
M-Type asteroids are the most common type. What separates Psyche from the others is its size. The average diameter is 140 miles. It’s about the size of Massachusetts, making Psyche the largest metallic asteroid known to humans.
Psyche was discovered in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer. Psyche was named after the Greek goddess of the soul. It’s now believed the asteroid is the exposed core of a planet left over after the creation of our solar system. Instead of forming into a planet, the theory is a series of collisions removed Psyche’s rocky outer layers.
The scientists taking part in the mission said studying Psyche will tell us more about our own planet’s core, which is far too hot and too deep underground to study all that well.
NASA’s mission to the asteroid is also called Psyche. It was originally scheduled to launch in September 2022, but the launch was scrubbed because of numerous delays in development and testing. The mission is back on the launch books and should take off in October.
The Psyche satellite will take about five years to reach the Psyche asteroid. Once there, it will spend 26 months in orbit gathering data to determine the exact composition of the asteroid and whether it produces its own magnetic field. If it does, that would be more evidence toward proving Psyche is a discarded planetary core, and not just another large asteroid.
The motivation behind NASA’s Psyche mission may be purely scientific, but the implications of what the mission may discover are far broader. There are already commercial endeavors to start asteroid mining, and if one of those companies succeeds, the global economic paradigm will no doubt shift dramatically.
