CNN Indonesia
Friday, 06 Oct 2023 08:01 WIB
Illustration. NASA will send an observation mission to an asteroid which is believed to contain abundant iron. (Photo: iStockphoto)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will send an observation mission to asteroid which is believed to have abundant iron content with the aim of studying the planet’s core.
According to the statement NASAthe launch is targeted to take place on Thursday (12/10) at 10.16 EDT or 21.16 WIB using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This high-tech spacecraft called Psyche will travel 3.5 billion kilometers to the asteroid called 16 Psyche.
“This will be the first mission to an asteroid that contains a majority of metals, as previous missions explored asteroids made mostly of rock or ice,” according to NASA.
The goal is to study the 16 Psyches in great detail. This asteroid is believed to be not only very rich in metal. Scientists speculate this asteroid has an iron core and may have once been a planet.
If the hypothesis is correct, Psyche’s core is the same as Earth’s core material, which means studying this asteroid could provide direct answers to the mysteries of the planet’s center that humans cannot reach.
“Asteroid Psyche may be part of the interior of a planetesimal, a building block of rocky planets,” NASA said.
“By studying it, scientists are trying to determine whether the asteroid is the core of a planet,” the statement continued.
Infrared sensor
Before this mission began, scientists used other mechanisms to study the 225 kilometer wide space rock.
This way, they can find out what will be left inside the NASA spacecraft when it arrives there in 2029.
Launch Spacea team from the Southwest Research Institute even recently announced some of the results they had about the asteroid.
The results they collected utilized two sophisticated infrared instruments: the now pioneering James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the now-defunct Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).
Infrared sensors, unlike standard optical sensors, can observe data in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The light associated with this region is essentially invisible to the human eye. We can only see a small part of the spectrum known as the visible region.
This is why infrared astronomy is so important. The reason is, infrared astronomy can help reveal parts of the universe that are usually hidden to us and the old telescopes that we usually use.
However, although the data from this tool offers significant insights into the 16 Psyches, perhaps the biggest findings remain to be discovered.
“All observations using different techniques continue to show results that don’t make sense in context with each other,” said Anicia Arredondo, a postdoctoral researcher at SwRI and lead author of the paper in a statement.
“That’s why it’s very important for us to have a mission there now,” he concluded.
(lom/dmi)
2023-10-06 01:01:15
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