The asteroid Psyche will be the first metal-rich celestial body to be visited by a spacecraft.  The NASA mission launches in 2022 and is expected to arrive at the asteroid in late 2026.  A central question to be answered is whether Psyche is the exposed  core of a protoplanet that was stripped of its rocky mantle. (NASA)

Deep inside the rocky planets of our solar system, as well as some solar system moons,  is an iron-based core.

Some, such as Earth’s core,  have an inner solid phase and outer molten phase, but the solar system cores studied so far are of significantly varied sizes and contain a pretty wide variety of elements alongside the iron.  Mercury, for instance, is 85 percent core by volume and made up largely of iron, while our moon’s core is thought to be 20 percent of its volume and is mostly iron with some sulfur and nickel.

Iron cores like our own play a central role in creating a magnetic field around the planet, which in turn holds in the atmosphere and may well be essential to make a planet habitable.  They are also key to understanding how planets form after a star is forged and remaining dense gases and dust are kicked out to form a protoplanetary disk, where planets are assembled.

So cores are central to planetary science, and yet they are obviously hard to study.  The Earth’s core starts about 1,800 miles below the surface, and the cores of gas giants such as Jupiter are much further inward, and even their elemental makeups are not fully understood.

All this helps explains why the upcoming NASA mission to the asteroid Psyche is being eagerly anticipated, especially by scientists who focus on planetary formation.

Scheduled to launch in 2022, the spacecraft will travel to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and home in on what has been described as an unusual “metal body,”  which is also one of the largest asteroids orbiting the sun.

While some uncertainty remains,  it appears that Psyche is the  exposed nickel-iron core of a long-ago emerging rocky protoplanet, with the rest of the planet stripped away by collisions billions of years ago.

An artist’s impression of solar system formation, and the formation of a protoplanetary disk filled with gases and dust that over time clump together and smash into each other to form larger and larger bodies. (Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook )

That makes Psyche a most interesting place to visit.… Read more