{"id":138117,"date":"2022-04-14T15:02:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T20:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/ars-takes-a-clean-room-tour-of-jpls-asteroid-orbiting-psyche-spacecraft"},"modified":"2022-04-14T15:02:58","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T20:02:58","slug":"ars-takes-a-clean-room-tour-of-jpls-asteroid-orbiting-psyche-spacecraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/ars-takes-a-clean-room-tour-of-jpls-asteroid-orbiting-psyche-spacecraft","title":{"rendered":"Ars takes a clean-room tour of JPL\u2019s asteroid-orbiting Psyche spacecraft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ars-takes-a-clean-room-tour-of-jpls-asteroid-orbiting-psyche-spacecraft.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ars Technica had the opportunity to tour NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/feature\/jpl\/nasa-shows-off-psyche-spacecraft-to-media\">clean-room sneak peek<\/a> at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that learning more about this unusual asteroid will advance our understanding of planet formation and the earliest days of our Solar System.<\/p>\n<p>Discovered in March 1,852 by the Italian astronomer <a title=\"Annibale de Gasparis\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Annibale_de_Gasparis\">Annibale de Gasparis<\/a>, 16 Psyche is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/16_Psyche\">an M-type asteroid<\/a> (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from the earliest days of our Solar System, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren\u2019t consistent with an <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1029%2F2019JE006296\">entirely metallic remnant core<\/a>. Rather, it\u2019s more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.<\/p>\n<p>Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it\u2019s an object like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)\">1 Ceres<\/a>, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter\u2014except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ars Technica had the opportunity to tour NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a clean-room sneak peek at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}