Good morning. It is October 30, and also you did not suppose I’d miss out on a rocket launch photograph every now and then, did you?
This {photograph} was taken earlier this month, on October 13, throughout the mid-morning launch of the Psyche asteroid mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket with its 27 Merlin engines. The Psyche mission will research a metal-rich asteroid with the identical title, and it’s NASA’s first spacecraft ever constructed to review an asteroid that has extra steel than rock or ice. It’s tremendous intriguing as a result of we do not know what we are going to discover as soon as we get there.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to attend some time as a result of Psyche is situated in the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Psyche is just not scheduled to enter orbit about its goal asteroid till August 2029, which appears like a painfully very long time to attend for a payoff.
In the meantime, if you wish to comply with Psyche’s progress, you are able to do so by means of this real-time view. As of this writing, Psyche is greater than 70 million kilometers away and zipping away from us.
Source: NASA.
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