NASA's Psyche spacecraft is set to launch on Oct. 12, beginning its mission to investigate a giant metal asteroid of the same name and unravel the secrets of the early solar system.
NASA will launch its latest mission, Psyche, this week. The spacecraft will visit a strange asteroid which is thought to be made almost entirely of metal.
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be. What remains of Psyche may hold the answers as to how Earth and its neighboring planets were formed, and a namesake mission is on the case to probe the asteroid for clues.