The space rock contains a core of iron, nickel and gold worth £8,000 quadrillion
NASA is launching a mission to explore an asteroid worth a mind-boggling £8,000 quadrillion – enough to make everyone on Earth a billionaire.
The Psyche mission aims to survey the 140-mile-wide asteroid which orbits the Sun, in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The space rock is metal-rich, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory saying it appears to be the “exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet”.
“Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets – including Earth – scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets’ rocky mantles and crusts,” it says on its website.
“Because we cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”
The asteroid is composed of materials similar to those in the core of our own planet. Forbes reports that Psyche could contain a core of iron, nickel and gold worth $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or £8,000 quadrillion in sterling.
This would dwarf the current global economy of around $74 trillion.
NASA is set to send a craft towards the asteroid on 5th October this year with an aim to explore how planetary cores and planets form, which seems like a waste of a craft!
The mission had actually been set to fly last year but it wasn’t ready, though experts have now managed to complete a full test of the spacecraft and its capabilities.
It’ll be a six-year mission for the spacecraft, which is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center at 10:38am EDT (3:38pm BST) on 5th October.
If that doesn’t turn out to be the big day, then there are other potential launch dates scattered throughout the month of October, though the sooner it sets off the sooner it gets there.
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