NASA will head to asteroid 16 Psyche – long thought to be the core of a dead planet – in 2022 to determine if it really contains enough metal that it’s worth $10,000 quadrillion and could make every person on the planet a billionaire.
But one new study suggests it’s more likely a pile of rubble.
The research, published in Planetary Science Journal, suggests that 16 Psyche is 82.5 percent metal, 7 percent low-iron pyroxene and 10.5 percent carbonaceous chondrite.
Those figures are well below previous estimates that said it could contain as much as 95 percent metal, making it chock full of iron, nickel and gold.
‘Psyche as a rubble pile would be very unexpected, but our data continues to show low-density estimates despite its high metallic content,’ Cantillo added.
If it’s more rubble-like and less metallic inside as Cantillo and the other researchers believe, it would be similar to other asteroids in the solar system, such as asteroid Bennu.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission recently started its 1.4 billion mile journey home after collecting 2.1 ounces of rock and dust from Bennu that could shed new light on how the solar system formed.
To come up with their findings, which have been peer-reviewed, the researchers recreated the surface of 16 Psyche in a lab, mixing different ingredients until the light patterns that saw matched those of the asteroid.
‘Having a lower metallic content than once thought means that the asteroid could have been exposed to collisions with asteroids containing the more common carbonaceous chondrites, which deposited a surface layer that we are observing,’ Cantillo said.
Nonetheless, Psyche 16 is still an enormous deal to scientists, as NASA notes.
It was the 16th asteroid to be discovered on March 17, 185 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis.
Psyche 16 takes roughly five years to orbit the Sun once, but only four hours to rotate on its axis, making a Psyche 16 day six times shorter than that on Earth.
It is approximately 114 miles wide, roughly the same size as the state of Massachusetts and contains one percent of all material in the asteroid belt, according to EarthSky.org.
Even if 16 Psyche is worth less than the $10,000 quadrillion figure that has been thrown out there (one that could destroy the world’s economy), it’s still valuable to researchers who hope to learn more about what they believe to be the remains of a long-ago planet.
The opportunity to study an exposed core of a planetesimal is extremely rare, which is why they’re sending the spacecraft mission there,’ Cantillo said, ‘but our work shows that 16 Psyche is a lot more interesting than expected.’
The researchers also believe there is water on 16 Psyche’s surface, so they will look to merge their data with other missions to asteroids to determine how much.
After giving it a go-ahead in 2017, NASA will send a mission to 16 Psyche, slated to launch in August 2022.
The $117 million spacecraft – which NASA began building last July – will go into space on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
It will arrive at the asteroid in the asteroid belt in early 2026, following a gravity assist from Mars in 2023.
The craft will spend 21 months in orbit, mapping and studying the giant space rock’s properties, with the goal of the mission to determine if it is indeed the core of planet-sized object.