NASA’s Psyche clicked a series of stunning pictures of Mars, including a crescent view, as the spacecraft recently whizzed past the red planet on its way to a distant asteroid.
Psyche completed the maneuver on May 15, passing within 4,609 km of the Martian surface in a gravity-assist flyby – commonly known as a slingshot, in which a spacecraft uses the gravity of a planet or satellite to propel it towards a different destination.
Among the photos it took was one of Mars as a thin crescent, made possible because Psyche approached Mars from a high phase angle, catching the sunlight reflecting off its surface.
It also took thousands of other images of the approach to Mars and of the planet’s atmosphere and surface, including the double-ring crater Huygens and the surrounding heavily cratered southern highlands. The images were taken using the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument.
The Psyche team confirmed that Mars had given the spacecraft a boost of 1,000 miles per hour and that its orbital path relative to the Sun had shifted by about one degree.
“Although we were confident in our calculations and flight plan, monitoring the DSN’s Doppler signal in real time during the flyby was still exciting,” said Don Han, the mission navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The spacecraft is now heading directly toward its target, the metal-rich Asteroid 16 Psyche, which is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It will reach its destination in summer 2029, travelling more than 3.6 billion kms in nearly six years since its launch in October 2023.
About the Mission and its future
Psyche’s main job is to study the metal rich asteroid, which gives the mission its name. After its arrival in 2029, Psyche will spend about two years orbiting the asteroid to take photos, map the surface, and collect data to determine its composition.
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