A space probe is on its way to an asteroid that may be filled with valuable metals worth some $10,000,000,000,000,000,000, or $10 quintillion.
The asteroid, named 16 Psyche, is located in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is thought to be chock-full of valuable metals like gold, platinum and cobalt and therefore possibly worth 100,000 times the value of the world's $100 trillion gross domestic product.
NASA launched a spacecraft, also named Psyche, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 13, 2023, and it is due to arrive at the asteroid in summer 2029.
The $10 quintillion figure is based on the value of the asteroid's potential bounty if it were transported back to Earth and somehow mined.
"That's something I've contemplated for a long time. Even if we could grab a big metal piece and drag it back here...what would you do?" Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the lead scientist on the NASA mission, told Global News in 2017.
"Could you kind of sit on it and hide it and control the global resource—kind of like diamonds are controlled corporately—and protect your market? What if you decided you were going to bring it back and you were just going to solve the metal resource problems of humankind for all time? This is wild speculation obviously," said Elkins-Tanton, who is also the director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.
However, even if the Psyche mission does find that its namesake asteroid contains such riches, there is no way with our current technology to bring the asteroid home. Also, extracting materials from such a remote location would involve massive logistical and economic challenges.
Even if mining somehow became feasible, the sudden influx of such a vast amount of metal into the world's economy would likely cause the metals' market prices to plummet, significantly reducing the asteroid's effective value.
Psyche will orbit around the asteroid for over two years, coming within 47 miles of 16 Psyche's surface as it takes measurements of this strange asteroid.
"I am excited to see the treasure trove of science Psyche will unlock as NASA's first mission to a metal world," said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA's headquarters, in a statement.
The potato-shaped asteroid Psyche is about 173 miles long and 144 miles across. It is between 186 million miles and 372 million-plus miles from the Earth, depending on where each is in its orbit around the sun.
While the majority of other asteroids are made mostly of rock and ice, Psyche is thought to contain between 30 and 60 percent iron and nickel. This led scientists to suspect that Psyche is the metallic core of an early planet that never fully formed or perhaps another bizarre metal-rich body we don't know anything about.
By investigating this unique asteroid, scientists hope to better understand how planets like our own formed in the early days of the solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago.
"By studying asteroid Psyche, we hope to better understand our universe and our place in it, especially regarding the mysterious and impossible-to-reach metal core of our own home planet, Earth," Fox said.
The van-sized Psyche spacecraft will hit speeds of up to 124,000 mph on its long journey to the asteroid and is due to slingshot past Mars in early 2026 before it arrives at Psyche in 2029. The craft is propelled using electric ion thrusters, which accelerate Psyche by churning out charged ions of xenon into the abyss.
When Psyche arrives at its destination, it will spend at least 26 months analyzing the asteroid's surface composition, gravity and magnetic field, which will provide clues as to what the tiny world is made of.
"This will be the first time we've sent a mission to a body that is not mostly rock or ice, but metal," Benjamin Weiss, an MIT professor of planetary science, said in a statement in October 2023, after the launch. "Not only is this asteroid potentially a metal world, but asteroids are building blocks of planets. So Psyche could tell us something about how planets formed."
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