Everything went well. NASA’s Psyche mission successfully took off this Friday from a platform at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA), and began a historic journey towards an asteroid rich in metals. There is a lot of hope with this mission because the research derived from it can provide clues about the origin of the center of the Earth and other celestial bodies.
At the scheduled time, 10:27 a.m. Eastern time in the United States (14:27 GMT), and after a couple of postponements, the last due to bad weather, a Falcon Heavy rocket from the SpaceX company took flight from Cape Canaveral with the Psyche ship in its peak, which awaits a journey of 3.5 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles) to its destination. If everything goes as planned, the spacecraft will reach the vicinity of Mars in May 2026 and from there continue towards the asteroid Psyche, where it will arrive in August 2029.
The Psyche mission represents the first ever carried out to an M-type asteroid (the class that groups predominantly metallic objects). It is also the first in which a laser-based communication mechanism with the Earth will be tested, which can achieve transmission capacities between 10 and 100 times greater than traditional radio ones. To do this, the spacecraft carries a laser transmitter as well as a 22-centimeter aperture telescope capable of receiving light sent from Earth (about 300 million kilometers away).
Likewise, the spacecraft will test, for the first time beyond lunar orbit, electric impulse motors. The operation is based on capturing energy from the Sun through its solar panels, and using it to expel accelerated xenon ions (an inert gas), which, in turn, will generate the Psyche impulse.
Adding to the record of numbers one for the mission is the fact that NASA will use, for the launch, a Heavy Rocket rocket from the aerospace company SpaceX, becoming the first one carried out by the North American space agency with this rocket model.
