Slashdot reader shirappu writes: For eight years now, the Mars Rover Curiosity has been exploring the surface of Mars. Even now, it's still exploring, and still getting upgrades. According to Tech Crunch, NASA is now looking to interested volunteers to help upgrade the rover's terrain-scanning AI systems by annotating image data of the planet itself.
"The problem is that while there are lots of ready-made data sets of images with faces, cats and cars labeled, there aren't many of the Martian surface annotated with different terrain types..." notes TechCrunch. "Improvements to the AI might let the rover tell not just where it can drive, but the likelihood of losing traction and other factors that could influence individual wheel placement."

shirappu continues: Volunteers go through a short tutorial after which they can label images to help the rover better understand the terrain on which it drives. The system is expected to be used in future planet rover robots, and the project marks an interesting example of open crowd-sourcing to improve machine learning systems, and how it is impacting technology even on other planets.

Click this link for the AI4Mars site link where people can volunteer.

Later this year, the International Space Station will receive a new and improved toilet system designed to bridge the gap between current lavatorial space tech and what humans will need to make extended visits to, say, Mars, in comfort. Space.com reports: It has a fancier name, of course; officially, the commode is NASA's Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The launch is targeted for no earlier than the fall, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Space.com, although the agency is still determining what spacecraft will carry the new plumbing up. The toilet currently on offer on the U.S. side of the space station was designed in the 1990s and based on its shuttle counterpart, according to a detailed review of space toiletry. But the apparatus has its flaws. It can be clunky to use, particularly for women, and it is "sensitive to crew alignment on the seat," sometimes resulting in messes, according to that review.

So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste. Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment. The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA's ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.

An anonymous reader writes: When talking about the nine year gap since America last flew astronauts with their own spacecraft, it's often said that NASA didn't have a plan in place when they retired the Space Shuttle. But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. NASA was working on a new spacecraft and rocket, and even made a successful test flight two years before the last Shuttle flight, but the program ended up getting canceled when the White House Administration changed. A review concluded that completing the program "would cost at least $150 billion dollars, and even then, a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars in the foreseeable future was unlikely," according to the article. Money was instead allocated to private alternatives like Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spaceplane as well as Boeing's CST-100 Starliner -- though in the end it was SpaceX's Crew Dragon which would launch the next American rocket carrying American astronauts into space. "The dark horse soundly beat the entrenched giants," the article concludes, "and the democratization of space has never been closer.

"It's hard to predict what the next decade of human spaceflight will look like, but there's no question it's going to be a lot more exciting than the previous one."

"Crew Dragon's hatch is closed, securing @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug in the spacecraft ahead of liftoff," SpaceX tweeted an hour ago.

Livestreaming of the launch has already begun, with liftoff scheduled in about 41 minutes.

GeekWire reports: If liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurs today at 3:22 p.m. ET (12:22 p.m. PT), it'll be a feat that America hasn't been able to perform since NASA retired its space shuttles, nearly nine years ago. "We are going to launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared during a launch-eve briefing at the space center's countdown clock.

But even Bridenstine acknowledged that's not a sure bet for today. "Weather challenges remain with a 50% chance of cancellation," he tweeted this morning. A drenching rainstorm swept over Florida's Space Coast overnight, but the skies cleared up this morning... The launch can be scrubbed at any time, all the way down to the last second, if the weather doesn't cooperate or if a technical glitch arises. If the gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon doesn't lift off today, Sunday is an option. The chances of acceptable weather are expected to improve to 60%. The weather outlook is even better for a June 2 backup opportunity...

Hurley and Behnken, who are both experienced shuttle astronauts, are scheduled to rendezvous with the space station on Sunday and move in alongside its current occupants, NASA's Chris Cassidy and Russia's Anatoly Ivanishin. NASA hasn't yet decided how long the Dragon riders will spend in orbit. Their stay could be as short as six weeks, or as long as 16 weeks, depending on how the test mission proceeds. For the return trip, Hurley and Behnken will strap themselves back inside the Dragon and descend to an Atlantic splashdown.

This whole flight serves as an initial demonstration of the Crew Dragon's capabilities with an actual crew aboard. If the mission is successful, yet another Crew Dragon will carry four different astronauts to the space station weeks after Hurley and Behnken return.
Reuters reporter Joey Roulette also spotted NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman by the side of the road as his fellow astronauts drove by. He was holding a sign that said "Take me with you."

And GeekWire notes that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine sees this event as historic. "I really think, when we look into the future, we're going to see these models of doing business with public-private partnerships apply not just to low Earth orbit... but we're taking this model to the moon and even on to Mars."

UPDATE: SpaceX just tweeted that the re-usable Falcon 9 booster rocket "has landed on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship!"

"One of the longer chapters of the International Space Station has come to a close," writes Engadget.

"NASA has sent the last of its 11 ExPRESS (Expedite the Processing of Experiments to the Space Station) science racks to the orbiting facility, 19 years after sending the first two." They don't look like much, but they provide the power, storage, climate control and communications for up to 10 small payloads — they're key to many of the experiments that run aboard the ISS and will help the station live up to its potential research capabilities. This last rack was carried aboard a Japanese cargo ship and should be installed and functioning by fall 2020. While the EXPRESS racks should be useful for a while yet, this effectively marks the end of an era for NASA's ISS work...
Originally developed by engineers at Boeing and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, "The first two completed racks were delivered to the space station on STS-100 in 2001 and have been in continuous operation ever since," notes a NASA press release, "as have all the subsequent added racks." And since then NASA has logged more than 85 total years of combined rack operational hours. "The sheer volume of science that's been conducted using the racks up til now is just overwhelming," says Shaun Glasgow, project manager for the EXPRESS Racks at Marshall.

"And as we prepare to return human explorers to the Moon and journey on to Mars, it's even more exciting to consider all the scientific investigations still to come."

The mystery of some lava-like flows on Mars has been solved by scientists who say they are caused not by lava but by mud. Phys.Org reports: There are tens of thousands of these landforms on the Martian surface, often situated where there are massive channels scoured into the surface by ancient liquids flowing downstream. These channels are extremely long, extending many hundreds of kilometers in length and usually more than dozens of kilometers wide. They are believed to be the result of massive floods involving huge bodies of water comparable to the largest floods ever known to have occurred on Earth. When the water seeps into the subsurface it can emerge again as mud.

A European team of researchers has now simulated the movement of mud on the surface of Mars, with the results published in Nature Geoscience. [...] Using the Mars Chamber at the Open University, the scientists recreated the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure on Mars as part of a simulation of conditions on both Earth and Mars. The scientists performed experiments at low pressure and at extremely cold temperatures (-20C) to recreate the Martian environment. They found that free flowing mud under Martian conditions behaves differently from on Earth, because of rapid freezing and the formation of an icy crust. This is because water is not stable and begins to boil and evaporate. The evaporation removes latent heat from the mud, eventually causing it to freeze.

Under Martian conditions, the experimental mud flows formed similar shapes to "pahoehoe" lava frequently occurring on Hawaii or Iceland on Earth, which cools down to form smooth undulating surfaces. In the experiment, this happened when liquid mud spilled from ruptures in the frozen crust, then refroze. However, under terrestrial atmospheric pressure, the experimental mud flows did not form lava shapes, did not expand, and had no icy crust, even under very cold conditions.

The US government today released information on three new malware variants used in malicious cyber activity campaigns by a North Korean government-backed hacker group tracked as HIDDEN COBRA. From a report: The new malware is being used "for phishing and remote access by #DPRK cyber actors to conduct illegal activity, steal funds & evade sanctions" according to the information published by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Defense (DoD). U.S. Cyber Command has also uploaded five samples of the newly discovered malware variants onto the VirusTotal malware aggregation repository. Besides the malware samples shared by the U.S. Cyber Command, CISA has also published detailed malware analysis reports (MARs) on its website containing indicators of compromise (IOCs) and YARA rules for each of the detected samples. The cybersecurity agency also provides mitigation measures in the form of Snort rules, as well as recommendations for system owners and administrators to strengthen the security posture of their organization's systems.

SpaceX's newest Starship prototype has fired its engine for the first time, potentially paving the way for a test flight in the very near future. Space.com reports: The SN4, the latest test version of SpaceX's Mars-colonizing Starship vehicle, aced a "static fire" Tuesday night (May 5), lighting up its single Raptor engine briefly while remaining on the ground at the company's South Texas facilities. "Starship SN4 passed static fire," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter late on Tuesday. [You can see video of the static fire here.] With the static fire in the rearview mirror, SpaceX can begin prepping the SN4 for its next big moment: an uncrewed test flight, which Musk has said will take the vehicle to a target altitude of about 500 feet (150 meters).

The Trump administration is drafting a legal blueprint for mining on the moon under a new U.S.-sponsored international agreement called the Artemis Accords, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA's plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with U.S. allies yet.

The Trump administration and other spacefaring countries see the moon as a key strategic asset in outer space. The moon also has value for long-term scientific research that could enable future missions to Mars -- activities that fall under a regime of international space law widely viewed as outdated. The Artemis Accords, named after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's new Artemis moon programme, propose "safety zones" that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the breakup of Comet ATLAS, a.k.a. C/2019 Y4. "The telescope resolved roughly 30 fragments of the fragile comet on April 20 and 25 pieces on April 23," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The Hubble Space Telescope's new observations of the comet's breakup on April 20 and 23 reveal that the broken fragments are all enveloped in a sunlight-swept tail of cometary dust. These images provide further evidence that comet fragmentation is probably common and might even be the dominant mechanism by which the solid, icy nuclei of comets die. [...] Because comet fragmentation happens quickly and unpredictably, reliable observations are rare. Therefore, astronomers remain largely uncertain about the cause of fragmentation. One suggestion is that the original nucleus spins itself into pieces because of the jet action of outgassing from sublimating ices. As this venting is likely not evenly dispersed across the comet, it enhances the breakup. [...] Hubble's crisp images may yield new clues to the breakup. The telescope has distinguished pieces as small as the size of a house. Before the breakup, the entire nucleus may have been no more than the length of two football fields.

The disintegrating ATLAS comet is currently located inside the orbit of Mars, at a distance of approximately 145 million kilometres from Earth when the latest Hubble observations were taken. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on 23 May at a distance of approximately 115 million kilometres, and eight days later it will skirt within 37 million kilometres of the Sun. You can view an animation of Hubble's observations on YouTube.

The Starship SN4, a prototype of a SpaceX ship meant to one day take humans to the moon and Mars, has remained intact during pressure testing. ExtremeTech reports: Last year, SpaceX successfully tested the "Starhopper" prototype with one of the company's new Raptor engines. However, the full-scale prototypes haven't fared well in pressure testing. SN1 blew its top in February, and both SN2 and SN3 suffered similar fates during the "cryo" testing phase, which simulates a full-pressure tank in the vacuum of space. SN4 is the first version of the rocket to survive that test.

The success of the SN4 prototype is a big step forward for the Starship program. The next step is to set up a static fire test with a single Raptor engine on the SN4. That could happen as soon as next week. Assuming it's still in one piece, SpaceX will then conduct a brief flight up to 500 feet (150 meters) before setting down. Elon Musk says that the next variant (predictably called SN5) will feature the full-scale tank and a trio of Raptor engines. The final design calls for six Raptor engines on the Starship and a further 37 of them on the Super Heavy stage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime -- notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty -- allows the use of such resources. This view has long held sway in U.S. government circles. For example, the United States, like the other major spacefaring nations, has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework. And in 2015, Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon and asteroid resources.

The new executive order makes things even more official, stressing that the United States does not view space as a "global commons" and sees a clear path to off-Earth mining, without the need for further international treaty-level agreements. The executive order, called "Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources," has been in the works for about a year, a senior administration official said during a teleconference with reporters today. The order was prompted, at least in part, by a desire to clarify the United States' position as it negotiates with international partners to help advance NASA's Artemis program for crewed lunar exploration, the official added. (Engagement with international partners remains important, the official said.) "As America prepares to return humans to the moon and journey on to Mars, this executive order establishes U.S. policy toward the recovery and use of space resources, such as water and certain minerals, in order to encourage the commercial development of space," Scott Pace, deputy assistant to the president and executive secretary of the U.S. National Space Council, said in a statement today.

A Portuguese historian argues that Magellan's famous trip around the world in 1522 was much harder than sending humans to Mars: Tens of guys died making this crossing; of 250 crew, only 18 returned, Henrique Leitao, a historian at the University of Lisbon, told me... [O]nce NASA or other space agencies or private entities actually launch humans on a six month trajectory to the Red planet, they will likely have mitigated the lion's share of risks to the crew. In contrast, Magellan's crew realized that at least a third of them would likely never survive their journey, says Leitao...

Is there a comparison between the Age of Discovery and drivers for the exploration and commercialization of space? One could argue that minerals on asteroids could be seen as the present-day equivalent of the Age of Discovery's highly-prized Asian spices. And that actually getting these 16th century spices back to Europe was arguably just as arduous and seemingly difficult as any initiative to return exotic materials from a near-Earth asteroid... Risk is inherent in any off-world human voyage. But when it comes to safety, today's technology and current knowledge of in situ conditions on Mars itself will arguably give future explorers an inherent edge over Magellan's generation.
The article also summarizes Leitao observation that one of the crew members who died on the trip was Magellan. "For 40 days Magellan walked around The Philippines; gets involved in a completely absurd fight with locals on a beach and is killed."

Mars was once covered by oceans, but lost its atmosphere over time, according to Gina DiBraccio, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN mission.

Is the same thing happening to Uranus? The magnetic bubble surrounding the giant gas planet may be siphoning its atmosphere off into space, reports Digital Trends: Uranus's atmospheric loss is driven by its strange magnetic field, the axis of which points at an angle compared to the axis on which the planet spins. That means its magnetosphere wobbles as it moves, which makes it very difficult to model. "The structure, the way that it moves," DiBraccio said, "Uranus is really on its own." Due to the wobbling of the magnetosphere, bits of the atmosphere are drained away in what are called plasmoids — bubbles of plasma which pinch off from the magnetic field as it is blown around by the Sun. Although these plasmoids have been seen on Earth and on some other planets, they had never been observed on Uranus before the recent analysis of old Voyager 2 data.
Interestingly, the theory comes from a new analysis of 30-year-old data gathered by the Voyager 2 space probe -- long before it reached the edge of our solar system.

NASA unsticks its Martian digging probe by whacking it with a shovel. From a report: Every day, the InSight lander's suite of instruments sends back data proving that the Red Planet isn't really dead. Marsquakes rumble the seismometer. Swirling vortices register on onboard pressure sensor. And temperature sensors help track the weather and changing of the seasons. Despite the lander's successes, however, one gauge has met with resistance from the Martian environment while trying to carry out its mission. Something has stopped InSight's 15-inch digging probe, dubbed "the mole" for its burrowing prowess. Instead of diving deep into the Martian sand where it could take the planet's temperature, it's been stuck half-buried. An intercontinental team of MacGyvers has spent a year devising successively daring plans to get the mole digging again, but still it flounders on the surface. Now their final gambit -- directly pushing the mole into the soil -- has shown tentative signs of success, NASA announced Friday on Twitter.

The goal of the mole, which is the measurement probe of InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (or HP3), is to track the temperature variations of Mars itself. This heat comes from Mars's core, which, like Earth's core, remains warm from the planet's birth. By measuring it, researchers hope to learn about Mars's formation -- but from the rod-shaped mole's current position they can get readings only of the surface temperature. Mission planners hope to ideally reach 15 feet underground to escape the warming and cooling from the Martian seasons that would interfere with reading the planet's true temperature. A rock could be in the way, but the more likely culprit appears to be the Martian soil. Previous observations had led the German Aerospace Center engineers who designed the probe to expect that it would be digging through loose sand. They built the mole to bounce up and down like a jackhammer, sinking with each stroke and threading its way around any modestly sized rocks it encountered. But the probe has found soil that seems more dirt-like than sand-like; It sticks together and doesn't collapse around the mole to give it enough friction to dig. What the mole needs is a little nudge.

Europe and Russia have decided to push back the launch of their joint robotic rover to Mars until 2022, rather than launch this year as originally planned. More testing is needed on the vehicle's parachutes ahead of the launch, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and there isn't enough time to get all of that work done before the launch window in July and August. The Verge reports: This is the second major delay for the rover, which is a critical piece of the ExoMars mission -- a partnership program between ESA and Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos aimed at figuring out if Mars ever hosted life. Originally, the rover, named after the famous chemist Rosalind Franklin, was meant to launch in 2018, but it was pushed until 2020 due to delays in delivering the scientific payloads. Now, the parachutes needed to land the vehicle on Mars are to blame. Last year, two high-altitude drop tests here on Earth damaged the parachutes, with some even tearing while they inflated. ESA wants to do two additional parachute tests ahead of the mission, but they won't occur in time to allow a summer launch to happen.

Additionally, some of the electronics inside the vehicle that carries the rover down to the surface need to be returned to their suppliers for troubleshooting. The final software for the mission is also delayed, and engineers don't have enough time to test it out before the summer. And if that wasn't enough, Jan Worner, the director general of ESA, admitted that the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic is playing a role in the delay. [...] Now, the earliest option to launch the Rosalind Franklin rover is 2022, thanks to how Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The two planets only skim close by one another every 26 months, giving scientists a limited window to launch spacecraft to the Red Planet. With a launch window opening up this summer, multiple countries including the US, China, and the United Arab Emirates are launching spacecraft to Mars. But since ExoMars cannot make the deadline, the next opportunity to launch is between August and October 2022.

While ESA and Roscosmos wait for 2022, the rover will go into storage, and engineers will lubricate the vehicle over the next two years to maintain all of its components. In the meantime, the Russian Proton rocket that will launch the rover and the vehicle's European carrier spacecraft are all ready to go and have no issues. So the Rosalind Franklin rover should be ready to go by 2022 if the upcoming tests go well.

Ars Technica's senior space editor visited SpaceX's South Texas Launch Site for a long profile of Elon Musk (who was wearing an "Occupy Mars" t-shirt). Just two weeks ago Musk had called an all-hands meeting at 1 a.m. which led to a massive hiring spree of 252 people, doubling the site's workforce, within the next 48 hours. "Most of the new hires, even those who had inked contracts at midnight, were told to report for work the next morning..." SpaceX is designing its factory here to build a Starship every 72 hours... Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla's assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they'll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free...

"A high production rate solves many ills," he said. "If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next...."

Other engineers have built an in-house, shielded machine to X-ray the welds... These machines existed only in the minds of engineers four weeks ago. The tent they've installed them in for testing was built less than three weeks ago. Musk has always had a knack for hiring brilliant young engineers, and those in the Boca Chica tents were mostly in their 20s, busting their tails for the boss. Willingly. Why? Because Musk empowers them to go fast, do cool things, and, very soon, to see their machines fly...

"I'll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I'd like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars," Musk said.
It's a 4,000 word article, but the last paragraph really captures the mood. "The place feels the way a U.S. Navy shipyard must have felt in the weeks after Pearl Harbor -- insanely busy but also purposeful. These kids and swarms of recently hired technicians are fighting against impossible odds every day, and they're determined to win. Don't tell them it can't be done.

"They're not having any of that in Muskville."

NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now 13 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.

But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.

Organic compounds called thiophenes were recently discovered on Mars, and a new study published in the journal Astrobiology thinks their presence would be consistent with the presence of early life on Mars. Phys.Org reports: "We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch said. "If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher." Thiophene molecules have four carbon atoms and a sulfur atom arranged in a ring, and both carbon and sulfur, are bio-essential elements. Yet Schulze-Makuch and Heinz could not exclude non-biological processes leading to the existence of these compounds on Mars.

Meteor impacts provide one possible abiotic explanation. Thiophenes can also be created through thermochemical sulfate reduction, a process that involves a set of compounds being heated to 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius) or more. In the biological scenario, bacteria, which may have existed more than three billion years ago when Mars was warmer and wetter, could have facilitated a sulfate reduction process that results in thiophenes. There are also other pathways where the thiophenes themselves are broken down by bacteria.

An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati: SpaceX has been awarded a $117 million launch contract for NASA's Psyche mission that will study a unique metal asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. The NASA mission to loft a 5,750-lb. (2,608-kg) spacecraft atop of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket will study a mineral-rich asteroid named 16 Psyche. The mission is expected to take place sometime in 2022 and launch from NASA's historic Launch Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Psyche is an intriguing, metallic world orbiting in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Most asteroids are made of rock and ice, but not Psyche — it's composed of iron and nickel. That's what makes it an interesting target. Scientists want to study it because they believe Psyche could provide insight into how planets form. Terrestrial bodies, like the Earth, have metallic cores deep in their interior, below the outer layers like the mantle and crust. Psyche could be one of these metallic cores: the remnant of a violent collision with another planetary body billions of years ago. We're unable to study the Earth's core directly, so Psyche could provide a lot of insight into our own planet as well as how other rocky planets form...

This mission is one of true exploration because scientists aren't exactly sure of what we will find. Ground-based measurements indicate that Psyche could be as large as Mars, and is probably shaped like a potato. But is this hunk of metal the dead, exposed heart of an ancient protoplanet or could it be a weird iron-rich alien world....?

This is SpaceX's 8th contract from NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP) and the first for Falcon Heavy.
NASA has shared a terrific animation showing what the asteroid will look like.