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Mission Psyche: An Unexplored world for NASA
2.4 billion kilometers will be what the aircraft will travel towards an asteroid belt, characterized by its wealth of metals.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) anticipates for August of this year a strange and possibly remarkable achievement with the Psyche rocket, which will surround a world that we can barely locate from Earth and that we have never visited, said the institution.
The Psyche mission hopes to arrive in 2026 at an unexplored belt of space rocks, rich in metals and with a name similar to that of the space work.
In the NASA statement they report that, "From ground and space telescopes, the steroid appears as a fuzzy spot. What scientists know from radar data is that it is shaped like a potato and that it spins around".
The company maintains that specialists study that the Psyche space rock is rich in metals, possibly being an early development in our planetary group, either as a nucleus of a planetesimal, a piece of a planet, or as an early-stage material that is never melted.
Despite the mission's focal point, the researchers want to answer some basic questions about how the planetary cluster formed, among other questions.
The principal investigator and the leader of the famous Psyche mission, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, assured that, "if it turns out to be part of a metal nucleus, it would be part of the first generation of early nuclei in our solar system."
According to her, these and other questions can be more confidently addressed when they land, especially since they need to ask essential questions about the material that made the planets. He insists that, they are loaded with questions, without an answer. This is true research in every way.
This route considers the 2,400 million kilometers in space, which will be traveled when launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in August 2022, where Psyche will pass through Mars nine months later through a gravitational attraction of the planet to take off towards the steroid.
It is estimated that the rocket will reach its last path to face the space rock in late 2025, the closer it gets, the group responsible for the mission will turn on the cameras to take the known images to a higher degree.
NASA insists the images will also help engineers position themselves as they prepare to enter orbit in January 2026. The main orbit is projected.
At this time, the Psyche space rock appears, by all samples, lumpy, with a more prominent width above than below, estimated to be 280 kilometers, having an uneven mass distribution.
"Some sections could be less thick, similar to a towel, and others could be more conservative and more enormous. The pieces of Psyche with more mass will have a more prominent gravity, applying a terrestrial attraction on the shuttle", affirms the company.
NASA stated that some sections are less dense sponge-like, while others are more compact and much more massive. The more mass the parts of Psyche have, the more gravity they will have. This will exert a more solid pull on the spacecraft.
