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It is a pot of immeasurable wealth, orbiting the asteroid belt, some 370 million kilometers from Earth. The asteroid Psyche, discovered in 1852, is worth tens of times that of the entire world economy.
A recent study in light of the Hubble Space Telescope targets found that this asteroid, 226 square kilometers in diameter, is loaded with metals such as iron and nickel.
For scientists, Psyche is one of the most intriguing celestial objects to orbit between Mars and Jupiter, in the so-called asteroid belt. Made entirely of metal, it takes five years to orbit the sun and four hours to rotate on its axis.
“We have seen meteorites that are mostly metallic, but Psyche seems unique because it could be an asteroid made entirely of iron and nickel,” said Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in the United States.
“The Earth has a metal core, a mantle and a crust. It is possible that Psyche was a planet in formation struck by the gold of the Solar System, having lost the mantle and crust there,” said Tracy Becker.
Finding out if Psyche was ever a planet in formation, roughly the size of Mars, taking into account the analyzed metallic core, can provide scientists with a unique view of the Solar System millions of years ago, in a distant and remote time when the collisions Among protoplanets, like the one that created Earth, they were common.
According to the BBC, Psyche is in the crosshairs of NASA, the American Space Administration, which plans an exploration mission to the asteroid in 2022, with the support of Space X, the company of Elon Musk, also the head of Tesla.
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