The probe, which is named after Psyche, will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX rocket, and its first opportunity to launch comes Thursday morning at 10:16 a.m. EDT.

Astronomers have produced the most detailed map to date of the surface of 16-Psyche, an asteroid that scientists believe could hold clues to how planets formed in our Solar System.

NASA’s Psyche mission aims to lift off October 12 — and be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid that may be the exposed core of an early planetary building block.

Psyche is an M-type asteroid, meaning it is metallic, though it's not entirely clear what type of metal it is made of. Spectroscopy, one of the ways scientists determine the composition of ...

The mission, named for the 16 Psyche asteroid it will observe, will travel about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) over the next six years to reach the space rock, located in the outer ...

Psyche is also considered a "dwarf planet" because it’s roughly 140 miles in diameter. It’s sometimes referred to as 16 Psyche because it was the 16th minor planet discovered and thought to be ...

Psyche, an asteroid believed to be worth $10,000 quadrillion, is observed through Hubble Telescope in new study By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman , CNN 6 minute read ...

The asteroid 16 Psyche is of interest to scientists because it is a large, 173-mile-wide (280-kilometer-wide) fragment of an ancient planet's metallic core that was left over from our solar system ...

However, theory that 16 Psyche could be the remains of a planet that never made it—the leftovers of a planet core—makes it priceless to astronomers trying to figure how the Solar System formed.

So not 95% metal, then, as previously suspected. “Our work shows that 16 Psyche is a lot more interesting than expected,” said lead author David Cantillo, an undergraduate student at UArizona.

16 Psyche is one of the most massive objects in the main asteroid belt orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid's metal is worth an estimated $10,000 quadrillion, more than the entire ...

Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name.Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal ...