NASA's Psyche Spacecraft Slingshots Past Mars on Its Way to a Metal Asteroid

NASA's Psyche spacecraft completed a close flyby of Mars on August 1, passing just 2,800 miles above the planet's surface at about 12,000 mph and capturing a stunning time-lapse of the terrain below, The Weather Channel reported. The maneuver used Mars' gravity as a slingshot, bending the probe's trajectory and accelerating it toward its ultimate destination: the metal asteroid 16 Psyche.

A World of Metal

16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed core of a planet that lost its rocky outer layers in ancient collisions — a direct window into the building blocks of planetary formation. The spacecraft, launched in October 2023, is now on course to arrive at the asteroid in 2029, where it will spend roughly two years mapping the object's composition, gravity, and magnetic field.

The flyby also gave mission controllers a chance to exercise Psyche's science instruments on a real world ahead of the deep-space encounter, and the raw data stream has already produced detailed views of the Martian surface.

Bonus Science

The Mars gravity assist was the largest planned trajectory adjustment of the entire voyage, and NASA says the encounter went exactly as designed. Psyche is NASA's first mission to a metal-rich world, and its findings could reshape understanding of how planetary cores — including Earth's — formed in the early solar system.