SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket To Launch NASA Mission To ‘Unique’ Asteroid In 2022
SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket To Launch NASA Mission To ‘Unique’ Asteroid In 2022
NASA has announced that SpaceX will launch the agency’s Psyche spacecraft in 2022, a mission to study an asteroid of the same name in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will launch the mission in July 2022 at a cost of $117 million. This will be the first NASA science launch for the Falcon Heavy, with SpaceX also scheduled to launch several NASA missions on the smaller Falcon 9 rocket, following the launch of the TESS exoplanet telescope in 2018.
The launch will take place from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral in Florida. There will also be two secondary payloads onboard – EscaPADE, which will study the atmosphere of Mars, and Janus, designed to study binary asteroids.
Psyche itself is an exciting mission to the metal-rich Psyche asteroid. This unique object “appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet – one of the building blocks of our Solar System,” noted NASA.
The spacecraft will take more than three years to reach its target, entering orbit in January 2026, where it will then study the 250-kilometer-wide object from afar to work out how it was formed and if it is similar to Earth’s own core.
Since the Falcon Heavy’s first test flight in February 2018, the rocket has been used sparingly, completing only a further two missions. Its last launch in June 2019 for the US Air Force also included some NASA experiments as secondary payloads.
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