What would the Earth look like stripped down to just its core? The insides of our planet are almost completely unknowable, and we learn more about them every year. NASA, though, would like to step up the process a bit, and so, in 2023, it’ll be sending an exploratory craft (pictured below) to the strangest asteroid in the solar system, one that might once have been a planet.
16 Psyche, or just Psyche if you’re nasty, is nearly a hundred miles in diameter and is thought to be the exposed iron core of a former planet. It is, in its own way, the most valuable object currently known in the universe: The iron from Psyche alone, if we could drag it to Earth, is worth an estimated $10 quintillion at current market prices. For contrast, the world’s economy is $73 trillion, last year.
But NASA isn’t interested in hauling iron, and diverting Psyche is, fortunately for the iron industry, impossible. Instead the Psyche mission is about scientific curiosity. This might be the closest we get to seeing a planet’s core without having to bust out a drill and scientists have questions about what happens when an asteroid that’s mostly rock slams into a huge metal object, how planetary cores are formed, and, oh yeah, just what happened that a planet was stripped down to its core and left to drift in our asteroid belt. We’ll find out soon.
(Via NASA)