Featured Image Credit: NASA
Topics: NASA, Space, Science, Technology
Callum Jones
NASA has shared the timeline for when the $10,000 quadrillion asteroid will be brought down to our planet.
Last year, the space agency announced that it was going to set off for the faraway asteroid named 16 Psyche, which is thought to contain precious metals, including gold, iron and nickel, worth an eye-watering amount.
"Teams of engineers and technicians are working almost around the clock to ensure the orbiter is ready to journey 2.5 billion miles to a metal-rich asteroid that may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form," NASA said in a statement released last July.
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The spacecraft was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on October 13, 2023.
After the exciting moment occurred, NASA shared a timeline for when the $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 asteroid will be brought to Earth.
The vessel has been travel a journey of 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km) through space and is expected to reach the asteroid in August 2029.
Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have spent much of the past few months checking over the spacecraft's system, and consistently assessing whether it is still fit to travel into deep space.
Once it reaches the asteroid in it's location in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the vessel will then orbit the Psyche for just over two years, all while measuring its gravity, magnetic proprieties and composition with a collection of specially selected instruments.
The spacecraft is then programmed to approach Mars in May 2026 for a small gravity assist intended to boost its momentum.
This will put the spacecraft in trajectory for its final destination - with the mission planned to reach its conclusion in November 2031.
According to NASA, the asteroid measures a whopping 173 miles (280 km) across and 144 miles (232 km) long, while its surface area is 64,000 square miles (165,800 square km).
And it's the asteroid's enormous size that made NASA decide to go ahead with the mission.
Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, explained: "Psyche is by far the largest, and that's why we want to go to it.
"Because the smaller ones are more likely to have been changed by things impacting them, whereas the big one, we think, is going to be completely unchanged."