NASA’s asteroid-bound Psyche mission is headed for an encounter with Mars on Friday (May 15). The spacecraft, which is on its way to an asteroid also called Psyche, will come within around 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet during the flyby.
The aim of this flyby is to utilize the gravity of Mars to give Psyche a boost to its already impressive speed of 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph). This will enable the spacecraft to adjust its trajectory towards the 173-mile-wide (280 km) metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche, (or just Psyche) which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
But the Psyche spacecraft won’t just use the gravity of Mars to get a boost that will help it save its xenon gas propellant; the Red Planet flyby will also offer Psyche a chance to test and calibrate the instruments it will be using when it gets to the main asteroid belt.
In order to do that, Psyche’s multispectral imager will be used to capture thousands of observations of Mars. This process began earlier this month.
Psyche’s operators first began prepping the spacecraft’s Mars encounter by performing a trajectory correction maneuver on Feb. 23. This involved firing the spacecraft’s thrusters for 12 hours, increasing Psyche’s speed, and refining its approach to the Red Planet.
“We are now exactly on target for the flyby, and we’ve programmed the flight computer with everything that the spacecraft will do throughout May,” Sarah Bairstow, Psyche’s mission planning lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA statement. “This is our first opportunity in flight to calibrate Psyche’s imager with something bigger than a few pixels, and we’ll also make observations with the mission’s other science instruments.”
The team thinks that the Psyche probe may observe a faint dusty ring, or torus, around Mars, which is thought to exist as a result of tiny space rocks, or “micrometeorites,” striking the surfaces of the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space.
The alignment between the sun, Psyche, and Mars could result in this dusty material scattering sunlight, making it visible to the spacecraft’s instruments.
The team will also use Psyche to search for tiny satellites around Mars, a practice that will benefit the mission when the spacecraft hunts for “moonlets” around Psyche when it arrives at the asteroid in three years or so.
“If all our instruments are powered up, and we can do important testing and calibration of the science instruments, that would be the icing on the cake,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley.