NASA's Psyche spacecraft orbiting the asteroid Psyche is about to launch. This is how the plane that will hunt the treasure asteroid looks like.
Currently, the engineer team is polishing the finishing touches on the Psyche plane which will be launched into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States (US) in August.
The Psyche spacecraft is headed for the metal-rich asteroid of the same name.
The spacecraft will fly to Mars for gravity assistance in May 2023, and in early 2026, orbit around asteroid 16 Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Scientists think the asteroid, which is about 280km away at its widest point, is estimated to be full of precious metal worth USD 10,000 quadrillion. That's why the asteroid Psyche is called the treasure asteroid.
Quoted from the Daily Mail, researchers from Brown University and Purdue University believe that the asteroid may actually be harder, because the way its gravity attracts objects around it suggests Psyche is much denser than a giant lump of iron.
NASA hopes its Psyche mission will be able to confirm this and determine the asteroid's true origin.
The US space agency believes that space rock is composed mostly of metal from the planetesimal core, one of the building blocks of the rocky planets in our Solar System, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
If so, this research could provide an opportunity to study how planets like ours formed.
Scientists believe that rocky planets have a solid metal core in the center of magma beneath their surface. But because they lie so deep beneath the planet's mantle and crust, they are difficult to measure and study directly.
Experts hope Psyche will open up the possibility, as they believe the asteroid is actually the open core of an early planet.