Emily Chan
There is a rare metallic asteroid floating through space that is worth an estimated amount of $10 quintillion.
To give you an idea of what $10 quintillion looks like, here is the whole number spelled out for you: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The asteroid is named 16 Psyche, and it is located in the Asteroid Belt between the planets Jupiter and Mars, millions of miles away from Earth.
The asteroid is large, measuring approximately 173 miles across. Its distance from Earth is somewhere between 186 million miles and over 372 million miles. It’s one of the largest objects currently floating in the asteroid belt.
Most asteroids consist primarily of rock or ice. However, scientists believe that 16 Psyche is mostly made up of iron and nickel, possibly between 30 and 60 percent.
Because it contains such a large quantity of valuable metals, it is thought that the asteroid might be the exposed core of an earlier planet that lost its outer layers as a result of violent collisions in the solar system.
NASA is on a mission to reach the asteroid. In 2023, the agency launched an unmanned spacecraft, also named Psyche, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to investigate the space object. It won’t arrive until August 2029. It is the first time that NASA will be visiting a metal world.
According to Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s Washington headquarters, studying the asteroid Psyche can give us a better understanding of our universe and the metal core of our own home planet, Earth, which is impossible for us to access.
The spacecraft is about the size of a van. As of May 2024, it was 190 million miles away from Earth, traveling at high speeds of 23 miles per second, which comes out to 84,000 miles per hour.
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