NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to a small, metal-rich asteroid near Jupiter. However, the barely 3,600-pound probe recently required a little help from Mars to complete its lengthy 2.2-billion-mile mission. Despite its complex gravity assist earlier this month, the groundbreaking spacecraft still found time to snap some travel photos showcasing its Red Planet flyby. NASA released the latest image from Psyche’s trip on May 20, which offers a gorgeous view of Mars just hours before Earth’s neighbor temporarily eclipsed the cosmic traveller.
According to NASA, the image was taken on May 15 at about 8:03 a.m. EDT by the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument. The thin crescent view of Mars is due to the spacecraft’s approach at what’s known as a high phase angle. The fingernail slice of Red Planet actually looks brighter and wider than mission specialists anticipated, thanks to a large level of sunlight scattering through the dusty Martian atmosphere. Interestingly, the instrument’s original unfiltered image wouldn’t look very discernible to the human eye. Instead, scientists processed the photo into a natural-color palette using the probe’s red, blue, and green imager filter data.
Launched in October 2023, Psyche is destined for 16 Psyche, a 140-mile-wide rock that astronomers theorize may be the remnant of an ancient planetary core. Once there, the spacecraft will study its iron magnetic properties, as well as use its imagers and spectrometers to analyze the asteroid’s chemical and elemental compositions.
Thanks to the Martian gravity assist, Psyche is scheduled to reach its destination in 2029. At its closest pass, Psyche swung around the Red Planet barely 2,800 miles above the surface at a speed of around 12,333 miles per hour.
