96.1 trillion US dollars: This is how high the World Bank estimates the global gross domestic product in 2021. The almost unimaginable number is made up of the total value of all goods and services that are generated in each country. About 370 kilometers away from our earth there is something floating in space that could be even more valuable: the asteroid “16 Psyche”.
The celestial body is said to consist of important metals such as iron and nickel, and possibly even gold, copper, platinum or cobalt. The amount of iron believed to be on Psyche alone could be worth $10 trillion, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a space scientist at Arizona State University in the US, once told Canadian news channel Global News.
To put that in perspective, $96.1 trillion is the number 961 followed by 11 zeros. 10 trillion is the number one – with 20 zeros. So it’s no wonder that the US space agency Nasa wants to examine the asteroid more closely. A probe to the psyche is to be launched under the direction of Elkins-Tanton. But before we tell you more, we want to ask you something:
The approximately 220 km wide celestial body is located in the large asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter – and could originally have been a planet. Elkins-Tanton and her colleagues suspect that Psyche, named after the Greek goddess of the soul, was rocked back and forth during the formation of the solar system, causing the outer layers of rock to be thrown away. A core similar to that of the earth is said to have emerged.
“It’s such a strange object,” Elkins-Tanton told Global News. “If it turns out to be a metal core, it would belong to the very first generation of early cores in our solar system,” the US newspaper Forbes quoted the head of the Psyche mission as saying.
Such an asteroid has never been explored in detail before – and from a distance it is difficult to determine anything specific about Psyche. But what researchers can say about the celestial body using radio measuring devices: It has the shape of an oversized space potato.
The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to start between August and October 2022. However, due to delays in the delivery of flight software and test accessories, the launch had to be postponed to a later start window, as the space agency announced. Scientists use the term to describe the period of time that a rocket can take off to reach its target. This depends on the capacities and energy reserves of the rocket as well as the orbit in which the rocket is to go.
If the probe had been launched this year, it would have reached the asteroid in 2026. Because of the changed sky constellation, the probe would need about six years to arrive at Psyche if it was launched in 2023 or 2024.
Elkins-Tanton can only guess what the space researchers will then face. “We don’t know what we’re going to discover. I expect that we will be completely surprised.”
By the way, this celestial body is also richly covered:
