Preparing to Meet a Metal-Rich Asteroid – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: AGU Advances

The Psyche spacecraft launched on 13 October 2023 and is on its way to visit its prime target, asteroid 16 Psyche. The target was originally selected because asteroid Psyche was thought to represent a fragment of a metallic core, left behind when a differentiated planetesimal was broken apart. Being able to investigate such a body, and to compare it with the small metallic fragments – iron meteorites – that we can analyze in the laboratory, made for a compelling discovery mission proposal.

In a new commentary, Dibb et al. [2024] summarize the capabilities of the Psyche spacecraft and the science questions that they hope it will answer. They also provide the most up-to-date thinking on Psyche’s composition, which is ambiguous. It now seems unlikely to be a purely metallic body, but a comprehensive answer will have to await spacecraft Psyche’s arrival, in August 2029.

Citation: Dibb, S. D., Asphaug, E., Bell, J. F., Binzel, R. P., Bottke, W. F., Cambioni, S., et al. (2024). A post-launch summary of the science of NASA’s Psyche mission. AGU Advances, 5, e2023AV001077. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023AV001077

—Francis Nimmo, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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