This Friday, Psyche will "Sling-Shot" Around Barsoom, To Gather Additional Speed -- And Then Onward, To Reach Its Asteroid / Destination, In 2029...

To be clear, this is a mission primarily to observe a far-off asteroid, but it offers a nice close-up view of Mars, in crescent formation, as we catch a gravity boost, by slingshotting past. . . Barsoom. [My much earlier 2023 backgrounder, here.]

Here is the latest from NASA, and a bit of it:

. . .NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will get a boost from Mars on Friday, May 15, passing just 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) from the planet’s surface at some 12,333 mph (19,848 kph). The spacecraft will harness the planet’s gravitational pull to speed up and adjust its trajectory toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, one of the more unusual objects in our solar system. . . .

Mars won’t initially look like the illuminated reddish disk seen in so many photos of the planet. “We are approaching Mars at a very high phase angle, which means we are catching up with the planet from its night side with only a sliver of sunlight creating a thin crescent,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University in Tempe. “The thin crescent on approach and the nearly ‘full Mars’ view after we fly past create opportunities for the imaging team for both great calibration observations as well as just plain beautiful photos.”

It’s possible that Mars may possess a faint dusty ring, or torus — the result of micrometeorites striking the surfaces of the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space. The Sun’s alignment with Psyche and Mars may cause dusty material to scatter sunlight, making it visible in the processed observations.

The imager will also capture “satellite search” observations of the space surrounding the planet — a practice run for when the team will be searching for any moonlets around the asteroid Psyche. There could be an opportunity to learn more about Mars as well. The spacecraft’s magnetometer will likely detect the planet’s magnetic field redirecting charged particles from the Sun, and the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer will monitor how the flux of cosmic rays (highly energetic subatomic particles from interstellar space) changes during the flyby.

“Ultimately, though, the only reason for this flyby is to get a little help from Mars to speed us up and tilt our trajectory in the direction of the asteroid Psyche,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley. “But if all our instruments are powered up, and we can do important testing and calibration of the science instruments, that would be the icing on the cake. . . .”

And, now the about three minute video explainer:



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