Welcome to this week’s AITN Lite and apologies for the lack of full bulletin last week. This AITN Lite will be linked to the last bulleting and Lite from a month or so and is discussing NASA sending a probe to an asteroid, which observations have suggested is made up of 60% iron and nickel. The article can be found here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67099605

The destination asteroid is called 16 Psyche. It is a large asteroid at 175 miles across, and is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. As an M-type asteroid, it contains higher concentrations of iron and nickel than other asteroids and they are considered very rare, with less than 10 known to exist in the Solar System. The interest in these objects is that they are thought to have formed from the remnant cores of early protoplanets. Their outer layers, crust and mantles, were removed by collisions in the early Solar System when it was much more chaotic than it is now.

The Psyche mission, named obviously due to its destination, was launched in October of this year and is expected to reach 16 Psyche after a journey of 70 months. After this journey, it will spend 21 months in orbit. The most major of its science goals are to understand the building blocks of planetary formation, iron cores, and to explore these new metal worlds. Along with these scientific goals, of which you can find more information at this link , there are some technological goals. It is aiming to test ion propulsion as a method for traversing the Solar System, along with laser communications that could be up to 100 times more efficient by the current means.