NASA launches $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe on 6-year voyage to rare metal-rich asteroid
CBSN
Getting off to a ground-shaking start, NASA's $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe roared into space atop a Falcon Heavy rocket Friday, setting off on a 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.
"We're going to learn about a previously unstudied ingredient that went into making our habitable Earth, and that is the metal that is now in the Earth's core and the cores of all of the rocky planets, cores that we can never visit but of course that we want to learn about," said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton.
"And Psyche is the single largest metallic object in our solar system. So if we want to learn about our cores, that's where we need to go."
