Nasa Psyche mission: 10 must know facts about asteroid mission

Nasa set to journey to an object composed not of rock, ice, or gas, but metal: the asteroid Psyche.

Psyche probe, folded inside the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, was slated for blastoff at 10:19 a.m. EDT (1419 GMT) from Nasa's Kennedy Space Center.

Scientists hope to learn more about the inner cores of rocky planets such as our own and understand the previously unknown class of cosmic body.

If Psyche were mineable, its iron, nickel and gold deposits could be worth an eye-watering $10,000 quadrillion: Forbes magazine

Mission's principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, said, "it's nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise with no truth to it."

Psyche's solar arrays convert light into electricity, providing the power for its four solar electric or "Hall-effect" thrusters.

Abi Biswas, Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, "Psyche will carry onboard a technology experiment, to demonstrate a "10 times augmentation of traditional telecom data rates, enabling the transmission of higher resolution images, more science data, and streaming video."

Nasa to shoot laser beam from a JPL facility on Table Mountain in California, with the spacecraft firing its signal back to Caltech's Palomar Observatory.

Planetary Scientist Ben Weiss said, "We can look at the pitch or frequency of the radio waves coming from the antenna and figure out how fast the spacecraft is moving" as it orbits its target."

Given its brightness, Psyche's almost entirely metal but consistent with the theory it is an exposed planetary core whose rocky crust and mantle were blown off in an ancient collision: Nasa.