NASA prepares craft to visit metallic asteroid

A metal-rich asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter may soon have its first visitor from Earth as NASA technicians prepare the Psyche spacecraft to explore it.

Workers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are putting the unmanned explorer through its final testing before its scheduled launch later this year in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The spacecraft will spend 21 months orbiting the asteroid, also named Psyche, in 2026 to study its properties and the building block of planet formation.

David Y. Oh, project systems engineer, Psyche mission said "I've been working on this for nine years since it was just a concept on a whiteboard and it is amazing how close we are to actually getting to ship this. It feels great to be here”.

This will be the first mission to explore an asteroid composed of metals instead of ice and rock.