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Asteroid 16 Psyche Could Truly Be a Psychedelic Little World—AND Worth Quadrillions
Artist’s rendering of the metal asteroid 16 Psyche. (Credit: Arizona State University)
NASA recently announced the go-ahead for a new Discovery-level mission that would send a spacecraft to explore 16 Psyche, a 130-mile-wide asteroid in the Solar System’s main belt between Mars and Jupiter. 16 Psyche is a relatively small world but is made almost entirely of metals—some of them what we’d consider precious on Earth, like nickel, gold, and platinum—and not only would that make it a fantastic-looking place with mountainous ridges of nickel and valleys filled with green olivine and yellow sulfur deposits, but also incredibly valuable…some estimates place 16 Psyche as “worth” up to $10,000 quadrillion.
Yes that’s quadrillion, as in one thousand trillion. (And times ten thousand!)
Read the rest of this story by Irene Klotz on Seeker here: Step Aside Iron Man, NASA’s Going to Explore a Strange Iron World
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Surprise: it can snow on Venus! (But it’s made of metal.)
Radar observations of Ovda Regio highlands show bright, reflective “frost” on rising slopes but dark “bare” patches at the highest elevations. (NASA Magellan data)
Our neighboring planet Venus is pretty badass. Sulfuric acid-laden clouds, crushing atmospheric pressure, and broiling surface temperatures soaring to nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius) make Earth’s “sister” world quite the alien horror show. And now there may be another strange phenomenon to add to Venus’ list of extreme oddities: heavy metal ferroelectric “snow” covering its highest mountain peaks — but, curiously, only up to a certain height.
Read the rest of my article on Discovery News here.
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Curiosity Spots an Unidentified Object on Mars
Is this the smallest UFO ever?
While scooping its first samples of Martian soil NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the image above, which shows what seems to be a small, seemingly metallic sliver or chip of… something… resting on the ground. Is it a piece of the rover? Or some other discarded fleck of the MSL descent mechanisms? Or perhaps an exotic Martian pebble of some sort? Nobody knows for sure yet, but it may just be the smallest UFO ever recorded (that’d be Unidentified Fallen Object…)
UPDATE: the object has been tentatively identified as a bit of plastic originating from the rover itself. Read more.
