NASA’s mission of discovering asteroids containing treasure of 10,000 million billion USD reached an important milestone

Scientists at the US Aerospace Agency NASA is accelerating the development of spacecraft for the mission of discovering the 16 Psyche asteroid, which is considered a “space treasure”.

Accordingly, the amount of minerals including gold, platinum, iron, nickel … existing inside the core of 16 Psyche is estimated to be worth up to 10 trillion USD. This is an extremely huge number, about 130,000 times the value of the global economy, which is about 73,700 billion USD.

After a period of preparation, the development of the Psyche spacecraft currently completed a ‘critical design’ phase last month, according to India Times. In the period from now to January 2021, NASA will focus on creating the final design of the ship, while also building and testing the systems.

Proposed design of the Psyche probe. Photo: NASA

On its official website, NASA claims this will be the first time the agency has been on a mission to discover an asteroid with a metal structure, instead of stone or ice.

In July 2020, NASA announced that it would equip a completely new probe for the Psyche, which is used to study the 16 Psyche asteroid to uncover more information about how planets form. Fort.

If development of the Psyche is completed on schedule, the ship will take off in August 2022 at Cape Canaveral (Florida) on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, then using its gravitational magnetic assistance. Mars in May 2023 and flies to Psyche 16 in early 2026.

After reaching the destination, the Psyche will spend 21 months studying the full 16 Psyche with the help of ultrasound, gamma ray spectrometer, neutron spectrophotometer and magnetometer. Of course, research is for scientific purposes only, not making money from this asteroid.

Asteroid 16 Psyche

It is known that Psyche 16 lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, 750 million km from Earth. This is an area containing billions – even trillions of – asteroids. Most of these asteroids are relatively small, ranging in size from a rock to a diameter of several thousand feet. However, some other asteroids are considerably larger in size. 16 Psyche is one of those few asteroids, thanks to a width of 252km.

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