Strange Metal Asteroid Targeted in Far-Out NASA Mi

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Strange Metal Asteroid Targeted in Far-Out NASA Mi

Strange Metal Asteroid Targeted in Far-Out NASA Mission Concept

Artist's concept of a spacecraft studying the huge metal asteroid Psyche from orbit.
Credit: JPL/Corby Waste

* One of the strangest objects in the solar system may get its first closeup in the coming years.

A team of scientists is mapping out a mission to the huge metallic asteroid Psyche, which is thought to be the exposed iron core of a battered and stripped protoplanet. The proposed mission would reveal insights about planet formation processes and the early days of the solar system, its designers say, and would also afford the first-ever good look at an odd class of celestial objects.

"This is the first metal world humankind will have ever seen," team member Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, told SPACE.com last month at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting in San Francisco. "I think this is an opportunity to do some fundamental science that hasn't been done before." [Possible Mission to Psyche (Images)]

The huge metal asteroid Psyche may have a strong remnant magnetic field.
Credit: Damir Gamulin/Ben Weiss

A protoplanet's core?

The 155-mile-wide (250 kilometers) Psyche, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, consists largely of iron. Scientists think the object is the nearly naked core of a protoplanet whose overlying rock layers were blasted off by massive collisions long ago.

Psyche thus offers a unique opportunity to learn more about the interiors of planets and large moons, whose cores are hidden beneath many miles of rock, Elkins-Tanton said.

"This is absolutely the only core-like object that we know about in the entire solar system," she said.

A robotic mission to Pysche would also help astronomers take the measure of metal worlds, a type of solar system object that scientists know very little about. The project would beam home the first photos and information ever gathered at such a body.

"We know a lot about stony and icy bodies, but what about metal ones?" Elkins-Tanton said. "What does the surface of a metal world look like?"

For example, she added, it's possible that material melted and blasted out by large impacts on Psyche solidifies in a sheet before being lost to space, causing metallic curtains of ejecta to jut from the rims of impact craters.