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On its way to a metal-rich asteroid more than 2.2 billion miles away, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft made a pit stop at Mars and came back with a camera roll worthy of your favorite space wallpaper collection.
NASA has released a stunning new video compiling images captured during Psyche’s month-long flyby of the Red Planet between May 2 and May 15. And these are not just distant postcard shots. The footage offers striking close-ups of Mars’ rugged landscape, revealing massive impact craters, windswept terrain, and even the planet’s icy north polar cap.
Mars was just a pit stop
If you have never heard of Psyche, that’s understandable. Mars isn’t actually its destination. The spacecraft launched in 2023 on a mission to visit 16 Psyche, a rare metal-rich asteroid that scientists believe could be the exposed core of an ancient planetesimal, the building block that helped form rocky planets billions of years ago.
Before getting there in 2029, however, the spacecraft needed a gravitational boost from Mars. Since it was already passing by, NASA figured it might as well put the spacecraft’s instruments through a real-world test. Turns out, that test produced some incredible views.
Not just pretty pictures
Sure, the photos are gorgeous but this was not a space tourism mission. The Mars flyby gave engineers a chance to test nearly every major scientific instrument onboard before Psyche reaches its asteroid target.
Its twin cameras successfully captured detailed images while also helping researchers calibrate the imaging system and measure how it handles scattered sunlight. The cameras even spotted Mars’ tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, giving the team practice for searching for possible miniature moons orbiting asteroid Psyche years from now.
Meanwhile, another instrument, the neutron and gamma-ray spectrometer, was busy hunting for clues about Mars’ chemical makeup. Even though the spacecraft flew no closer than about 2,864 miles above the surface, too far away to detect gamma rays, it still picked up neutron signals that closely matched scientists’ predictions.
Even Mars’ invisible force field made an appearance
One of the coolest moments happened where nobody could actually see anything. Psyche’s magnetometer, which has been monitoring the solar wind since launch, detected a sharp increase in magnetic activity as the spacecraft crossed Mars’ bow shock, the invisible region where the solar wind slams into the planet’s magnetic environment.
That kind of data won’t end up as your desktop wallpaper. However, it does help scientists better understand how Mars interacts with the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun.
The real adventure is still ahead
As impressive as these new Mars images are, they are really just a warm-up act. Psyche is still headed toward its namesake asteroid, where scientists hope to answer one of planetary science’s biggest questions regarding what the inside of an early planet actually looks like?
Sources: POPULAR SCIENCE, NASA
Read the original article here: NASA releases breathtaking new video of Mars surface
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