NASA’s Psyche probe snaps new Mars photos on its way to asteroid

(NewsNation) — NASA‘s Psyche spacecraft has snapped a new set of Mars photos.

The probe used the planet’s gravity to pick up speed and tilt its trajectory on its journey to a metal-rich asteroid, but NASA also took the opportunity to grab photos of Mars’ surface. The images, taken on May 15, show a rugged stretch of the planet’s southern highlands, including a 71-mile-wide crater called Fournier and a long cliff system known as Oenotria Scopuli.

The photos also let the team spot Mars’ two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, from a distance.

“The imager performed brilliantly, delivering some rarely seen views of the Red Planet,” Jim Bell, the mission’s imager instrument lead, said in a release.

The flyby also served as a full instrument check. Psyche’s magnetometer picked up a strong signal as it crossed into the region where solar wind crashes into Mars’ magnetic field. Its radiation-sensing spectrometer detected a burst of particles kicked up from the planet’s surface, which scientists had predicted.

“Psyche flew by Mars on exactly the trajectory we needed to set us on a path to rendezvous with the asteroid in the summer of 2029,” Bob Mase, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, according to the press release.

The spacecraft, launched in 2023, is now aimed at the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it will study a metal-rich asteroid also named Psyche, thought to be a leftover chunk of an early planet’s core.

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