NASA’s mission to metal rich asteroid 16 Psyche worth QUINTILLIONS approaches Mars #space #Astronomy #Science #EduTok #TikTokLearningCampaign

As such as release this photo, do you know what this is a picture of? Wrong, it's Mars, that's not the important part. It was taken by a spacecraft that's currently traveling two and a half billion miles to this object between Mars and Jupiter called 16 psyche, which looks like this. Why are they going there? This is a really, really weird object in our solar system. It's almost 140 miles across, and it is super, super metallic. It's so metallic that scientists think it reminds them of like the core of a planet so much so that some think that this might be the exposed, ancient, partial core of a planetesimal, which is a baby planet. So we have to go to figure out if it is, but also we've never been to a super metallic asteroid like this. Which by the way, this isn't the reason they're going, but imagine all of that iron and nickel and potentially gold and platinum. This object is worth quintillions of dollars, real number, quintillions of dollars. Spacecraft isn't going to land on this asteroid, but it is going to spend 26 months orbiting it and gathering data and getting photos that are better than this one. And it's obviously approaching Mars right now, so it should reach this asteroid in like 2029.