Psyche tagged posts

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

This scenario is quite possibly a decade away, at minimum, but that’s not stopping the bright minds at NASA from building and testing next-generation propulsion systems designed ...

The asteroid 16 Psyche, which NASA intends to visit with a spacecraft in 2026, may be less heavy metal and more hard rock than scientists have surmised, according to a new study by researchers from Brown and Purdue universities.

Psyche, which orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is the largest of the M-type asteroids, which are composed chiefly of iron and nickel as opposed to the silicate rocks that make up most other asteroids. But when viewed from Earth, Psyche sends mixed signals about its composition.

The light it reflects tells scientists that the surface is indeed mostly metal...