NASA's Psyche Mission Will Reveal Great Wealth Potential In Asteroid 16 Psyche

NASA's Psyche mission was finally launched (photo: twitter @nasa)

JAKARTA - After months of anticipation, NASA's Psyche mission was finally launched last week by the US space agency launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Psyche is a spacecraft built to explore a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid called 16 Psyche, which scientists estimate is worth more than 10,000 quadrillion US dollars worth of iron, nickel and gold material.

That number is enough to make everyone on Earth a billionaire. But NASA itself currently has no plans to extract the precious metal.

Psyche's previous launch has been delayed once, in which a $1.2 billion spacecraft was originally scheduled to launch into space on October 5, but was delayed for a week so engineers could update its driving configuration.

When it reaches orbit, Psyche will start a journey of 3.6 billion kilometers over six years towards a space rock of the same name, 16 Psyche. This 280-kilometer asteroid is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

No spacecraft has ever visited objects like 16 Psyche - believed to have a surface that contains a significant amount of metal than rock or ice - but if all goes well, the vehicle will arrive at its destination in July 2029.

This irregular and potato-shaped asteroid is believed to be the open core of the destroyed protoplanet - the rocky planet-forming material in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

If that's the case, this could provide a unique opportunity to learn how planets like ours, Earth, are formed.

Scientists say the space rock is likely one of the survivors of a violent collision, which is common when the solar system is in shape.

During the smaller planetesimal collisions and mergers, the larger object was initially completely fluid. The heavy loop then sank to the core, while the lighter rock floated to the surface.

However, according to NASA, 16 Psyche was then hit by another collision by another asteroid that peels its rock layers and leaves a naked metal core detected today.

Spectroscopic studies and radar observations show that its surface reaches 95 percent nickel and iron, a composition similar to Earth's core.

According to Dr. Linda Elkins-Tanton, a space scientist at MIT, if 16 Psyche were indeed full of precious metals, it could be worth a huge amount of money. He has calculated that iron in 16 Psyche itself will be worth 10,000 quadrillion US dollars.

Assume that the market for asteroid materials is on Earth, this can cause the value of precious metals to decline, and overall cause the world economy to collapse.

Of course, all of this is speculative and hypothetical, because if the space rock was worth nearly that much, it would not be easy to bring it back to Earth and there are currently no plans to do so.