Psyche mission, Musk conquers space
You know the science fiction novels and films of the 1950s in which there is a space mission to a planet or a metallic asteroid? With the usual whiskey-loving boatswain, the handsome captain and the beautiful scientist on board? Well, once again, science fiction has almost become reality, except for the human crew. In fact a carrier rocket Falcon-9 Heavy belonging to SpaceX Of Elon Musk ripped through the sky over Cape Canaveral (which some still call Cape Kennedy), Florida, and launched into space, taking the probe with it 10-Psyche for a mission dedicated for the first time to a metallic asteroid.
A long journey, 6 years, is expected to reach the asteroid which is about 450 million km away, with a “gravitational slingshot” provided by the planet Mars. There propulsion will be solar-electric. The purposes of the mission, as happens in these cases, are multiple. The noble one is to study well the composition of this metallic body made up of iron and nickel and potentially the prototype of other asteroids that are very dangerous for our planet, in the case of an impact route. And then there is the real reason which is the economic one: the asteroid Psyche it is in fact a sort of real space mine rich in mineral resources, as emerges from studies of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The shape is not the most attractive: it looks like an asymmetrical potato, despite bearing the name of a beautiful nymph. There NASA he estimated that the entire celestial body could be worth between 10 thousand quadrillion and 700 quintillion dollars. Numbers and names that seem taken from a Walt Disney comic starring Scrooge McDuck but incredibly real. To quantify and humanize these numbers, just think that 1 quadrillion in Italy, France and the USA is written with a 1 followed by 15 zeros, that is, a million billion.
These astronomical sums – it must be said – convinced the US government and NASA to accept a “budget” of approximately 1.2 billion dollars to finance the space mission. But who is Psyche and why does he bear this name? 16-Psyche was discovered by a Neapolitan astronomer, Annibale De Gasperis, at the Capodimonte observatory in 1852. The number 16 preceding the name means that it was the sixteenth asteroid to be discovered. The name Psyche, which – as mentioned – is that of a Greek nymph, is due to him.
The University of Arizona coordinates the mission from a strictly scientific point of view and experts believe that the asteroid is actually what remains of a real planet, or rather it would be its metallic core. This fact also enriches the mission with the possibility of studying the internal constitution of planets, such as that of Earth, Mars or Venus. The asteroid measures 280 by 232 km and is located between Mars and Saturn.
Researcher Simone MarchiCo-Investigator of the Psyche mission, declared: “The thing that struck me most was the length of the flame which from the perspective I was looking at it was at least three or four times the length of the rocket. An immense thing. A few minutes later we saw the boosters return and land and the thing that surprised everyone was the very high speed at which they reached the ground: from when we saw them pop up into the upper atmosphere to when they landed four or five seconds at most must have passed, and at the last moment they turned on the engine to decelerate. Then, a few seconds later, came the booms due to the supersonic re-entry which sounded like cannon shots and took us all by surprise. In short, everything went well and now we can only hope that the same will happen in the next phases, which will be equally important.”
#Psyche #mission #Musk #conquer #asteroid #worth #billion