On its recent launch, the Psyche spacecraft was the first NASA mission to make use of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
This article was written by Rick Weinberg and originally published by California Business Journal.
For years now, NASA and other space agencies have tracked the movements of 16 Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid in our solar system. That changed in 2023 when NASA sent a spacecraft to visit this wayward rock that could be worth up to $100,000 quadrillion.
The Metals of 16 Psyche
There are over a million asteroids in our solar system, spread across three different categories. While most are made from rock or nickel-iron, there are rare M-type asteroids that have a far denser metal composition. 16 Psyche is one of them – boasting 60% of its volume as metals. Those metals would be nickel and iron on its surface but, more importantly, platinum, palladium, and gold. This would make Psyche extremely valuable – estimated at $100,000 quadrillion. If true, it could be the first candidate for a lucrative space mining industry.
For decades, fiction has tried to predict what space exploration could look like and, for some, it’s mining precious metals. Even sci-fi slots in online casinos have used a similar premise, to frame the action of a traditional slot game. This is best seen with the popular Starburst slot, which is all about matching colorful crystals in a space setting. While space mining isn’t a reality yet, the ongoing NASA mission could prove the feasibility of a mining operation in the future. If successful, the 16 Psyche mission will mark humanity’s first contact with an asteroid that’s more metal than rock or ice.
The Mission to Psyche Explained
The Mission to Psyche has been in the making since 2014, but NASA’s spacecraft (also called Psyche) only left Earth on 13 October 2023. On its launch, the Psyche spacecraft was the first NASA mission to make use of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
To reach the asteroid, NASA has devised a route that will see the craft slingshot around Mars, using the red planet’s gravity well to increase velocity. Then, from current projections, it should arrive in 2029. The mission objective is simple – make contact with the asteroid and develop better theories on what it is.
To do that, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will orbit the asteroid several times to take images and get readings from it. It’ll use both gamma-ray and magnetism detectors to study its properties. If it is magnetic, then that would support a theory that Psyche is a remnant core of a planetesimal – some of the oldest rocks in space. They’re widely called the building blocks of planets and life as we know it, you can read more from Cambridge University. If that is true, 16 Psyche could hold immense scientific value besides its eye-watering net worth.
The orbiting operation will end in 2031, so it will spend over 800 days circling the asteroid. It won’t land on the asteroid, but knowing what 16 Psyche is and how it behaves could inform future missions to tap some of its immense value. A space mining industry is already forming, led by companies like AstroForge, who are prototyping the technology we’d use to mind asteroids like 16 Psyche. In the meantime, mankind will have to wait patiently for the opportunities that 16 Psyche could offer us.
