One of the exciting planetary science missions hopefully launching in 2022 is Psyche, which will visit the main-belt asteroid of the same name. The most recent part of the mission planning for the Psyche mission involved observations of the target with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).

The Array’s sixteen dishes can form a virtual antenna sixteen kilometers in diameter. This massive telescope can get images of 32 kilometers per pixel on Psyche, not bad for a 223-kilometer-diameter asteroid. These images were used to map the asteroid in significant detail. Instead of being all metallic, as previously thought, Psyche has regions of metal and regions of rock. Some of the craters may be filled with metal, which suggests that lavas erupted from the asteroid while it was still molten.

These results make the Psyche mission only more interesting. The work was published in the Journal Geophysical Research: Planets with lead author Saverio Cambioni.

More Information

MIT press release

“The Heterogeneous Surface of Asteroid (16) Psyche,” Saverio Cambioni, Katherine de Kleer, and Michael Shepard, 2022 May 19, JGR Planets