Asteroid Psyche won’t make you rich or hit Earth. NASA has another reason to visit it
About 170 years ago, an Italian astronomer discovered just the 16th asteroid detected by humankind. But it’s only been a couple of decades that scientists have known the rocky body — named Psyche after the Greek goddess of the soul — is unlike any other.
Scientists believe it’s primarily made of metal, unlike the rocky, icy and gas giants we’re used to exploring. It’s likely so rich in iron that it contains $10,000 quadrillion worth of metal (picture 15 more zeros). That’s more than Earth’s entire economy.
Unlike popular headlines suggest, Psyche cannot make us all billionaires, according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of a NASA mission led by Arizona State University that will send a spacecraft to visit the asteroid in 2026 following a four-year journey through the cosmos.
The mission is part of NASA’s Discovery Program and is set to launch in August 2022 with the help of SpaceX.
It will send a solar-powered spacecraft to orbit Psyche for nearly two years where instruments controlled from Earth will map the asteroid and study its properties, potentially teaching us how Earth and other planetary cores formed long ago.
About the length of the state of Massachusetts and floating between Mars and Jupiter, Psyche may be the metal core of an early planet that suffered violent impacts. Or it could be a survivor of a more-unusual and unknown process.
McClatchy News spoke with Elkins-Tanton about common misconceptions surrounding the asteroid and goals of the mission. Answers have been edited slightly for clarity.
What’s special about this mission and why should we care?
Think about the history of exploration and how unbelievably exciting it’s been for humankind to go to completely undocumented places, like when we first went to the North and South Poles; there were these crazy theories that there were holes in the poles that led to the center of the Earth.
We’ve landed on Mars, we’ve landed on the moon, we visited Mercury and we’ve orbited Venus. These missions are super exciting, but we know what we’re going to see to some extent. We literally have no idea what Psyche is going to look like because we’ve never visited any body that’s made primarily of metal.
Then there’s the real reason we do space exploration: it’s in our blood to explore. Space exploration is for all of humanity, to inspire us to be bolder and more effective in our own lives here on Earth. If we can build a robot that will fly through space and discover new worlds for us, then we can solve our problems here at home, as well.
How rare are metal asteroids in our solar system?
We really don’t know. There’s a whole class of asteroids that are categorized as M-type, meaning they have a reflected light spectra, consistent with their being metallic. There’s maybe 40 of them, but of those 40, there’s really only about nine that seem very likely to be made of metal. Their spectra — the properties of light emitted from objects — are strangely straight and featureless, which can be most easily explained if their surfaces are mainly made of metal. We think Psyche is between 30% and 60% metal, but it could be as much as 80% or 90%.
How did you estimate how much money Psyche is worth?
I assumed that the asteroid was made mostly of this iron nickel metal, similar to the composition of iron meteorites we see fall to Earth, most of which come from the asteroid belt where Psyche is.
Psyche is mostly made of iron, but it has a lot of nickel and copper. It also has some palladium, rhodium, gold, platinum and silver mixed in. I didn’t even consider those. So, I calculated what the mass of it would be and then what those metals were selling for on Earth’s market in January 2017 and multiplied it up.
Can Psyche really make everyone on Earth a billionaire?
It’s completely meaningless in terms of Earth value for a couple of major reasons. Some people think Psyche is threatening Earth, but it’s nowhere near us. It’s in a very stable orbit way past Mars, closer to Jupiter, so it’s never going to hit the Earth.
Because it’s so far away, we don’t have technology to capture it or bring samples back. That is never going to happen. Even if we could, that volume of metal suddenly being available on Earth would crash the markets and then it would be worth virtually nothing. So it’s a fantasy, but people do like that fantasy.
Has any person or group expressed interest in Psyche’s monetary value?
No, because all of those people understand it’s completely irrelevant. Headlines claim that because SpaceX is launching us that somehow Elon Musk is interested in the value of this asteroid. Absolutely not. There’s zero interest because there is zero realism in that idea. We just hired his company to launch the spacecraft.
Can we see Psyche from Earth?
Yes, you can see it from ground-based telescopes, even hobbyist ones, but it just looks like a star. The best images we have are from some big arrays of telescopes like the European Southern Observatory that’s looking for exoplanets outside the solar system. These telescopes can see Psyche’s shape change as it rotates, but we don’t have any surface detail.
Psyche goes all the way around the sun in five earth years. Isn’t that an absolutely amazing thing that we can actually calculate how to send something off of the Earth to travel through space for 3.4 years, catch up to this asteroid and then orbit around it, even though it’s so small and low gravity? It’s not like being captured into the orbit of a big planet with a huge gravity field. This one has a little gravity field. It’s uneven because the asteroid itself is uneven, and yet we can do that.
What would it mean if Psyche is confirmed to be the core of a planetesimal?
The cool thing to me is that it’s probably the only way humankind will ever see a core. There’s no other good candidate in our solar system. So, this is the one. We’ll measure its magnetic field to see if it has a magnetic dynamo like the Earth’s core has, and we’ll study its composition and texture to see what we can learn about how planetary cores formed.
