NASA is launching a mission to study a nearby asteroid worth more than 10,000 quadrillion dollars, which is said to contain so much precious metal that everyone on Earth would be billionaires if its value were shared. After discovering Psyche 16 in March 1852, the 124-mile-wide space rock will be the main focus of NASA's project, scheduled to launch in August 2022. The spacecraft will arrive four years later, in early 2026. It will be the first exploration into a world of metal rather than rock and ice. NASA said, "Unlike most other asteroids which are rocky or icy bodies, scientists think M-type (metallic) asteroid 16 Psyche is mainly composed of metallic iron and Earth-like nickel." asteroid is located between Mars and Jupiter. According to the Daily Mail, they are believed to be the "remnants of a protoplanet destroyed by collisions when the solar system was formed." A team in California has since created a new temperature map to help NASA understand the properties of the asteroid's surface. Usually, infrared images of a space rock only provide a fragment of data equivalent to a single pixel, but researchers could get a resolution of 50 pixels, according to the Daily Mail. "The findings are one step closer to solving the mystery of the origin of this unusual object, which some thought was a piece of the core of an unfortunate protoplanet" said the researchers of the recent study. They found that its surface was at least 30% composed, with additional rocks on the surface containing grains of metal. Katherine de Kleer of Caltech, professor of planetary sciences and astronomy, added: “We think that fragments of the cores, mantles and crusts of these objects remain today in the form of asteroids. If this is true, it gives us our only real opportunity to directly study the nuclei of planet-like objects. "
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