NASA Is Going After Money Making Asteroid
An asteroid that is estimated to be packed full of valuable metals which could be worth over $10,000 quadrillion is currently in our solar system.
The ‘Psyche 16 asteroid’ is a 124 mile-wide space rock that encompasses the sun in the asteroid belt, a donut-shaped area of space located between Mars and Jupiter – including well over a million rocks.
NASA is currently organizing a mission to examine the ‘goldmine’ asteroid in 2026 in an attempt to figure out its origins.
Some scientists have thought that it was once the core an early planet.
To help the mission, a new temperature map has been produced of Psyche by a team in Pasadena, California, to provide insight into what could be laying on its surface.
‘Psyche 16’ was discovered in 1852 and is believed to be the remnants of a protoplanet destroyed by ‘hit-and-run collisions’ when the solar system was forming.
Unlike other rocky or icy bodies of its kind, Psyche 16 is estimated to be made of principally iron and nickel and could be worth quadrillions of dollars in potential mining value.
Before the important NASA mission, the Californian team studied the millimeter-wavelength emissions of the asteroid – which enabled them to produce the first temperature map of the asteroid.
According to the authors of recent research on Psyche, the new findings are “a step closer toward resolving the mystery of the origin of this unusual object”.
“Which has been thought by some to be a chunk of the core of an ill-fated protoplanet,’ they continued.
Psyche is the largest of the ‘M-Type asteroids’, an enigmatic class of asteroids that are estimated to be remarkably metal-rich and hence could be fragments of the cores of protoplanets that broke up as the solar system formed.
“The early solar system was a violent place, as planetary bodies coalesced and then collided with one another while settling into orbits around the sun,” announced Caltech’s Katherine de Kleer, assistant professor of planetary science and astronomy.
“We think that fragments of the cores, mantles, and crusts of these objects remain today in the form of asteroids. If that’s true, it gives us our only real opportunity to directly study the cores of planet-like objects.”
Analyzing relatively tiny objects extremely far away from Earth poses a challenge to planetary scientists.
Psyche is as far as 200 million miles away.
The gigantic metal-rich asteroid was found by an Italian astronomer named Annibale de Gasparis on March 17, 1852.
He named the asteroid Psyche after the Greek goddess of the soul who married Eros (Roman Cupid), the god of Love.
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