NASA successfully launches its Psyche mission to a $10,000 QUADRILLION asteroid

After months of anticipation, NASA’s Psyche mission finally launched today.

The US space agency launched at 10:19 ET (15:19 BST) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

‘Hear the noise! It’s nothing but a good time. All aboard the #MissionToPsyche! Next stop: A metallic world,” NASA tweeted.

Psyche is a spacecraft built to explore a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid called 16 Psyche, which scientists think may be packed full of iron, nickel and gold worth more than $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072).

That’s enough money to make everyone on Earth a billionaire – although even if NASA is able to confirm this is the case, there are currently no plans to mine the precious metals.

Psyche’s launch had already been delayed once, with the $1.2bn (£988m) spacecraft originally scheduled to blast off into space on October 5, only for it to be pushed back by a week so engineers could update configuration of its thrusters.

When it reaches orbit, Psyche will begin a six-year, 2.2 billion mile (3.6 billion kilometer) journey to a space rock of the same name, 16 Psyche.

This 170-mile-wide (280-kilometer) asteroid is located in the the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

No spacecraft has ever visited an object like 16 Psyche — which is thought to have a surface that contains significant amounts of metal rather than rock or ice — but if all goes according to plan, the orbiter will reach its destination in July 2029.

The irregular, potato-like asteroid is believed to be the exposed core of a wreck protoplanets – the building blocks of the rocky planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

If so, it may provide a unique opportunity to study how planets like ours formed.

Scientists say the space rock is most likely a survivor of the many violent collisions common when the solar system was forming.

During this collision and merger of the smaller planetesimals, the resulting larger objects begin to melt completely.

The heavy metals then sink to the core, while the lighter rock floats to the top.

With 16 Psyche, however, NASA thinks that after it reached this stage it was then hit by another asteroid which stripped it of its rocky mantle and left behind a bare metal core that has been discovered today.

Spectroscopic studies and radar observations suggest that its surface is up to 95 percent nickel and iron, a composition similar to that of the Earth’s core.

If 16 Psyche is in fact loaded with precious metals, it could be worth a lot of money, according to Dr Linda Elkins-Tanton, a space scientist at MIT.

She calculated that the iron in 16 Psyche alone would be worth $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072).

Assuming the market for asteroid materials is on Earth, this could cause the value of the precious metals to drop, completely devaluing all property, including that of governments, and all companies involved in mining, distribution and trading of these goods.

Ultimately, this could lead to the collapse of the entire economy.

Of course it’s all speculative and hypothetical, because even if the space rock were worth anywhere near that kind of money, it’s not like it could easily be brought to Earth, and there are currently no plans to do so.

16 Psyche was actually only the 16th asteroid ever discovered, having been spotted in 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis.

It has an average diameter of about 136 miles (220 kilometers) and contains about 1 percent of the total mass of the entire asteroid belt—about 440 billion billion pounds (220 billion kilograms) to be exact.

This makes it among the 12 largest minor planets orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

The Psyche spacecraft will carry several instruments, including two high-resolution cameras and a spectrometer to determine the asteroid’s composition.

It also has a magnetometer to check if the space rock has a residual magnetic field, along with an instrument to measure its gravitational field.

The orbiter will spend a total of 21 months orbiting the asteroid as it captured the first images of 16 Psyche.

The hope is that by mapping and studying the asteroid in such detail, it will help researchers determine how it was created, which could shed light on the formation of our planet.