The Asteroid 16 Psyche Is Worth A Whooping $100,000 Quadrillion And NASA Is Explaining Why
About three times further from the Sun than Earth, Psyche is a massive metal-rich asteroid and one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt. Psyche is shaped like a potato, but not quite.
Imagine a compressed oval; if it were cut in half horizontally at the equator, it would be 173 miles (280 kilometers) broad and 144 miles (232 kilometers) long. Its surface area is 64,000 square miles (165,800 square kilometers).
Until recently, most scientists believed that most of the asteroid Psyche was made of metal. On October 13, 2023, NASA successfully launched a spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to travel 2.5 billion miles and establish contact with the distant asteroid 16 Psyche.
Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovered the asteroid 172 years ago. They used the number '16' because it was the sixteenth asteroid to be found, and 'Psyche' is the name of the goddess of the soul from Greek mythology.
But what NASA now knows, and what they were unaware of back then, is the enormous value of 16 Psyche, which is estimated to be worth an astounding $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. But why is it anticipated as being worth quite so much money?
'Psyche' is the name of the goddess of the soul from Greek mythology
According to NASA's website and according to the best research, Psyche is most likely composed of between 30 and 60 percent metal and the remaining rock. Both radar scans and measurements of the asteroid's thermal inertia—the rate at which an object absorbs or reradiates heat—have been used to estimate the composition of the object.
The Psyche spacecraft was launched in October of 2023
"We get it, it's huge and this is all very good, but it's what it's made of which is the really important bit here."
NASA also reveals in their website saying:
"Up until recently, the scientific consensus was that the asteroid Psyche consisted mostly of metal. The more recent data indicates that the asteroid is possibly a mix of metal and silicate, the same material found in glass and sand."
The Psyche Spacecraft
Scientist Wendy Caldwell of Los Alamos National Laboratory predicted to Space.com that the asteroid is primarily composed of nickel and copper. Even though NASA has produced a 3D model of the asteroid, until they are up close, nobody can be absolutely positive of what material it is made of.
In any case, the value of any metal of such mass has been estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of quadrillions.
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After entering orbit, the spacecraft will use a magnetometer, a radio instrument (for measuring gravity), a multispectral imager, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, and other instruments to map and explore Psyche. Among other things, the mission aims to ascertain whether Psyche is, in fact, the core of a planet.
We'll just have to wait and see, as NASA's spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at 16 Psyche in August 2029 and collect scientific data from the asteroid from November 2031.
