Scientists have long been intrigued by a large potato-shaped asteroid, called 16 Psyche, which they suspect is rich in iron – so it could be very lucrative for future asteroid mining.
The 173-kilometer object, which orbits the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has two large crater-like areas, which researchers say may be closely related to its still unknown history.
In a new paper published in the newspaper JGR Planetsan international team of researchers tried to get to the bottom of one of the most important questions about the 16 Psyche that remains unanswered. Is it a planetesimal core, a billion-year-old planet, where it will have “a huge bag of iron buried beneath the rocks,” or “a similar mixture of iron and rock?”
Alternatively, could 16 Psyche be the ancient exposed remnants of a planetary core whose surface and mantle exploded, or is it a fragmented slab of very dense, porous rock that became iron-rich or alloyed with iron after collisions with other asteroids?
Although the latest paper does not rule out one of these possibilities – its simulations support both hypotheses – the goal was to know what to expect once NASA’s mission to the space rock, launched in October 2023, arrives about three and a half years from now.
There, the spacecraft may finally allow us to solve the mystery surrounding the history of 16 Psyche once and for all. Like The Universe Today shows, 16 Psyche’s size makes it more approachable than the thousands of kilometers we would have to dig into Earth. (So far, we’ve only made it about 0.2 percent to the center of our planet.)
For their paper, the researchers considered 16 The unusual structure of Psyche, previous studies that concluded that it may have metallic elements and its porosity.
“Large bowls or craters are excavated deep within the asteroid, which provides information about what its interior is made of,” said first author and University of Arizona doctoral candidate Namya Baijal in a statement. “By simulating the shape of one of its largest craters, we were able to make testable predictions for the overall shape of Psyche when the spacecraft arrived.”
“One of our main findings is that porosity – the amount of empty space in an asteroid – plays an important role in how these craters form,” he added. “Porosity is often overlooked because it is difficult to include in models, but our simulations show that it can affect the process performance and the shape of the remaining craters.”
A more porous asteroid may have deep and high-sided craters on its surface. Researchers hope that close observations of NASA’s Psyche mission will allow them to determine its porosity and thus determine whether its interior is metal covered with rock, or a combination of the two.
To explain their thinking, the researchers used the unusual analogy of an abandoned pizza shop.
“The chefs are long gone, but you can look at what’s left — the ovens, the pieces of dough, the toppings — and get an idea of how the pizzas were made,” said University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory professor Erik Asphaug. “We can’t get to the center of Earth or Mars or Venus, but maybe we can get to the core of the first asteroid.”
The team came up with two possible interior designs.
“One is a structure with a metallic core and a thin, rocky mantle, which would have formed when a violent collision would have removed the outer layers,” Baijal explained. The other is a similar mixture of iron and silicate, produced by a big crash that brought everything together, like the iron-rich meteorites found on Earth.
By simulating a series of collisions between asteroid belts and objects of various sizes, they tried to reproduce the known dimensions of 16 Psyche’s craters.
“We found that a product about three miles across can make a crater of the right size,” Baijal said. “The shape of the crater corresponds to two levels of Psyche’s structure.”
In short, as we get closer to answering the question of whether 16 Psyche is an ancient planetary core, we’ll be ready when NASA’s mission gets there.
“When the spacecraft reaches Psyche in a few years, geochemists, geologists and modelers in the team will all look at the same object and try to explain what we see,” said Asphaug.
He added: “This work gives us a start.
More on Psyche: NASA Spacecraft Runs into Thruster Trouble En Route to Zillion-Dollar Asteroid
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