Three Weeks to Psyche Mission

Actually, three weeks to launch of the "next big mission" was today, Thursday September 14, at 10:38AM, with the launch now scheduled for Thursday October 5th.  It's big in the sense of being a first ever mission to "... a world  made not of rock or ice, but of metal" as the project's web page at Arizona State University says.  And it's big in the literal, descriptive sense; the spacecraft is so big it requires a Falcon Heavy to lift it.  

Psyche is the mission that was cancelled in '22, and the cancellation had a big impact on how long it will take the satellite to reach it's target; the asteroid 16 Psyche.  That one year delay moves the arrival date out three years - from 2026 to "before the end of the decade."  Then there's the cost.  In 2022, the Psyche mission was estimated to cost $985 million. That's now gone up to $1.23 billion. 

One of my favorite things that I've read about really any satellite mission is in this statement from Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator at Arizona State University.  It's the second small paragraph. 

Scientists aren't sure what awaits the Psyche spacecraft when it reaches its destination. Elkins-Tanton said modeling of the asteroid's appearance based on telescopic observations suggests it has an irregular potato-like shape.

"It's not spherical," she said. "I always say potato-shaped because potatoes come in many shapes, so I'm not wrong."
...
"We’re never going to get to our metal core (inside Earth)," Elkins-Tanton said. "The pressures are too high. The temperatures are too hot. The technology is impossible. ... But there's one way in our Solar System that we can look at a metal core, and that is by going to this asteroid.

“We’ve visited bodies that are made of rock," Elkins-Tanton said. "We've visited icy asteroids. We've looked at comets and the last ... category of objects that we've never visited as a species in our Solar System is bodies made of metal. So this is primary exploration, a new kind of object that humans have never seen before."

The mission web page at ASU has an image that they use of the asteroid.  I think that based on Elkins-Tanton's statement that the image is largely imaginative and not based on careful measurement of some sort of imaging or radar. 

Artist's illustration of NASA's Psyche spacecraft, as it approaches the asteroid, showing (most of) one its solar arrays.  NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU 

From time to time, you'll run across a story of someone finding an asteroid made of gold or platinum and how rich they could get.  It just kind of underlines that the author doesn't really understand supply and demand as well as the average prospector.  Go to anywhere in the world where there's a good deposit of some gemstone and you'll find the people in charge won't put it all on the market at once so they don't collapse the price.  Psyche is thought to more likely be the heavier metals found in planetary cores like iron, and nickel.  The reasons for the mission have much more to do with understanding how rocky planets with predominantly metallic cores form than finding the value of the metals in it.