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SpaceX Falcon Heavy set for 1st NASA launch to explore mysterious asteroid Psyche

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — SpaceX’s powerhouse Falcon Heavy rocket has flown commercial satellites, secret Department of Defense payloads and Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster into space. Now NASA is banking on the rocket for the first time, aiming to send a probe named Psyche to an asteroid with the same name this week.

The rocket that has the power of three Falcon 9’s essentially strapped together first flew in 2019, sending Musk’s Tesla out to an orbit that took the car past Mars. That’s where the Psyche probe is headed as well. It’s set to lift off from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A as early as 10:16 a.m. Thursday, although weather forecasts show only a 20% chance for good conditions. There are daily windows for launch until Oct. 23.

The $700 million satellite managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory aims to unlock the asteroid Psyche’s secrets, which scientists suspect is metal-rich. It resides in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“We think it is the core of what used to be a small planet,” said Sarah Noble, the mission’s program scientist with NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “Unlike other planets, where you would imagine that was made up of a core and a mantle and crust, just like Earth, but something happened that sort of ripped away most of the rock.”

The hypothesis is that this could be a mirror into what is essentially the beginning of every rocky planet in the galaxy.

“There’s no way to get to our core or any other core of any other planetary body,” she said. “So here’s one just sitting there in space waiting for us to go and explore it.”

It’s one of only nine known asteroids thought to be made of metal or with a metal surface, and that’s out of more than 1 million cataloged to date. Data have shown it likely has a nickel-iron core and has an average diameter of 140 miles, or roughly the drive from Daytona Beach to Tampa on Interstate 4, which keeps it among the top 20 largest known asteroids in the solar system and the largest metal one by far.

The @SpaceX Falcon Heavy with the @NASA Psyche spacecraft onboard was rolled to the launch pad today in preparation for launch from Launch Complex 39A to a metal rich asteroid named Psyche! Launch is targeted for Thursday, Oct. 12 at 10:16am EDT. 📷https://t.co/qslDoPJhbu pic.twitter.com/ohTeoF19kK

— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) October 10, 2023

The asteroid was first discovered on March 17, 1852, by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, named for the Greek goddess of the soul who in mythology was born human, but married the Greek god of love Eros, aka Cupid.

“This is really an adventure to the unknown, and it’s weird. It’s a weird asteroid, which scientists love,” Noble said.

The reveal, though, won’t come for a while as Psyche has to make a 2.5-billion-mile trip that includes a slingshot gravity assist around Mars and an arrival date nearly six years away in August 2029 when it will then begin more than two years of orbital observations set to end in November 2031.

The probe missed a launch opportunity last year that would have cut years off the mission, as it would have taken advantage of closer proximities among Earth, Mars and the asteroid, which orbits the sun between 235 million to 309 million miles away.

“We think we have an idea of what its shape is, and I always joke that it’s shaped like a potato because potatoes come in many shapes. So I’m not wrong,” said mission principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, also a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

To date, observations have only given scientists a tiny glimpse of its density, orbit and basic characteristics, so there’s plenty to discover.

“Even in Hubble, it’s just a few pixels,” she said noting that photos and scientific data from the probe’s instruments will be transmitted and made public at the same time as it’s available to scientists. “We don’t know what it’s going to look like. We’re going to be surprised. We’re going to learn something new about a fundamental building block for rocky planets.”

It’s the first trip by NASA to the asteroid belt as a primary destination since the Dawn mission visited Ceres and Vesta last decade, but one of several asteroid-focused missions under NASA’s recent scientific slate. That includes the return sample from the asteroid Bennu as part of the OSIRIS-REx mission that landed back on Earth last month and the DART mission that slammed a probe into a small asteroid last year.

Approved in 2017, it’s the 14th selection by NASA as part of its Discovery Program, which has included missions such as Mars Pathfinder, Kepler space telescope, Lunar Prospector and 2021’s Space Coast launch of the Lucy probe, also on its way to study asteroids that orbit the sun in front of and behind Jupiter.

NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division Director Lori Glaze said Discovery Program missions allow for more open-ended science.

“It’s really open to the creative ideas of the scientists, the principal investigators that propose the missions,” she said. “Larger missions are more strategic and we have defined destinations or defined science objectives, but in Discovery, it’s wide open. The scientists are free to propose whatever great science they think will fit in the cost box.”

It’s one of 39 active planetary missions among 146 across all of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. It rose to the top of a list of dozens of pitches because of its revelatory potential, Glaze said.

The probe is “going to see an asteroid type that we’ve never seen before, so it is that unique science that was incredibly compelling,” she said. “We really don’t know what we’re going to see, so truly a mission of discovery, which is fantastic.”