[imagesource: NASA]

Lately, NASA has been turning its attention to Earth, by focusing on the stars.

It sounds weird, I know, but space exploration extends past missions to Mars and the Moon, to include other bits of the universe, and more specifically our solar system, that could provide us with clues as to how our planet came into being.

Last month, in another landmark space adventure, NASA’s mission to collect dust and rocks from a large asteroid with the help of their Osiris-Rex probe was a success.

The material collected from the asteroid will help scientists assess the likelihood of the origin of life occurring throughout the galaxy and, ultimately, throughout the universe.

Asteroid Bennu, as it is called, isn’t the only asteroid on the space agency’s radar.

They’re now turning their attention to Asteroid 16 Psyche, one of the most massive objects in the asteroid belt in our solar system.

CNN reports that a new study in The Planetary Science Journal has taken a look at Psyche using the Hubble Telescope.

The exact composition of Psyche is still unclear, but scientists think it’s possible the asteroid is mostly made of iron and nickel.

It’s been hypothesized that a piece of iron of its size could be worth about $10,000 quadrillion, more than the entire economy on our planet.

That’s a number too big to contemplate without giving yourself a headache.

The study looked at Psyche from two specific vantage points in its rotation, thereby capturing both sides of the asteroid. The study also records the first ultraviolet observations of Psyche.

“We looked at the way that the ultraviolet light reflected off of the asteroid surface,” Tracy Becker told CNN. She is the lead author of the study and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

“The way the ultraviolet light was reflected from Psyche was very, very similar to the way iron reflects sunlight,” she explained.

The Psyche mission has been in the works for some time now.

They suspect that Psyche could be the metallic core of a planet that didn’t form. We can’t access Earth’s core, so taking a closer look at the asteroid could provide us with some insight into our own.

Studying Psyche could help us better understand those early times in the history of our solar system, when objects would have had “higher inclinations and crazier eccentricities,” and would have had more opportunities to collide with each other, Becker told CNN.

Apart from the study, NASA’s mission to Psyche, led by Arizona State University, is plugging away.

“We’re building space hardware and getting ready for our launch in August of 2022,” Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist who is the principal investigator for the mission, told CNN. Elkins-Tanton is also a minor author of the new study.

This video from February gives you an idea of why and how it got started:

NASA plans on sending an unmanned vessel to Psyche, to study it up close, and better understand its composition.

Scientists are also pretty amped about a 12 million-year-old meteorite that they reckon contains than 2 600 organic compounds, that might hold the secret to how organic compounds came to Earth.

I guess the truth really is out there.

[source:cnn]