There’s A Rare Metallic Asteroid Floating In Space That’s Worth Around $10 Quintillion

There is a rare metallic asteroid floating through space that is worth an estimated amount of $10 quintillion.
To give you an idea of what $10 quintillion looks like, here is the whole number spelled out for you: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The asteroid is named 16 Psyche, and it is located in the Asteroid Belt between the planets Jupiter and Mars, millions of miles away from Earth.
The asteroid is large, measuring approximately 173 miles across. Its distance from Earth is somewhere between 186 million miles and over 372 million miles. It’s one of the largest objects currently floating in the asteroid belt.
Most asteroids consist primarily of rock or ice. However, scientists believe that 16 Psyche is mostly made up of iron and nickel, possibly between 30 and 60 percent.
Because it contains such a large quantity of valuable metals, it is thought that the asteroid might be the exposed core of an earlier planet that lost its outer layers as a result of violent collisions in the solar system.
NASA is on a mission to reach the asteroid. In 2023, the agency launched an unmanned spacecraft, also named Psyche, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to investigate the space object. It won’t arrive until August 2029. It is the first time that NASA will be visiting a metal world.
According to Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s Washington headquarters, studying the asteroid Psyche can give us a better understanding of our universe and the metal core of our own home planet, Earth, which is impossible for us to access.
The spacecraft is about the size of a van. As of May 2024, it was 190 million miles away from Earth, traveling at high speeds of 23 miles per second, which comes out to 84,000 miles per hour.

lin – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
Eventually, it will get up to speeds of 124,000 miles per hour. The total length of its journey will be 2.2 billion miles, taking a circuitous route to get to its destination.
Recently, the craft entered “full cruise” mode. This means that it began using electric ion thrusters to help propel itself toward the asteroid.
The thrusters release charged ions of xenon that are powered by sunlight, maintaining a consistent acceleration.
By the spring of 2026, it will pass by Mars before reaching the asteroid toward the end of the decade.
Once it arrives, it will orbit around the asteroid for 26 months as it maps the space object’s surface, gravity, and magnetic field.
“This will be the first time we’ve sent a mission to a body that is not mostly rock or ice, but metal,” said Benjamin Weiss, an MIT professor of planetary science.
“Not only is this asteroid potentially a metal world, but asteroids are building blocks of planets. So Psyche could tell us something about how planets formed.”
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