NASA’s Psyche mission, deeply connected to MIT, aims to explore a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, believed to be the core of a primitive planet. MIT researchers play crucial roles in the mission’s magnetic field and gravity studies. The spacecraft will be equipped with a magnetometer, cameras, and a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, all crucial to unveil the mysteries of the asteroid’s composition and magnetic properties. (Artist rendition of a close-up of asteroid Psyche.) Credit: Peter Rubin/ASU
The NASA mission, a project with deep roots at MIT, is setting course for a metallic space rock that could be the remnant of a planetary core like our own.
On October 13, NASA’s Psyche mission launched, and now the spacecraft is headed to a metal world.
Psyche, a van-sized spacecraft with winglike solar panels, blasted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket last Friday at 10:19 a.m. Eastern Time. Psyche’s destination is a potato-shaped asteroid by the same name that orbits the sun within the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomers suspect that the asteroid Psyche, which is about the size of Massachusetts, is made mostly of metal. If that’s the case, the asteroid could be the exposed core of an early, infant planet that might hold clues to how the Earth’s own metal-rich core formed.
“It’s a puzzle. And you have to not only figure out how the pieces fit together, but you have to figure out what the pieces are,” says MIT Research Scientist Jodie Ream, who helped in the magnetometer’s design.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, lifts off from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A in Florida at 10:19 a.m. EDT on Friday, October 13, 2023. The Psyche mission will study a metal-rich asteroid with the same name, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This is NASA’s first mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice. Riding with Psyche is a pioneering technology demonstration – NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment – which will be the first test of laser communications beyond the Moon. Credit: SpaceX
Journey Details and MIT Connections
After it launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the Psyche mission embarked on a six-year interplanetary journey. In 2026, the spacecraft will approach Mars, where the planet’s gravitational pull will slingshot the spacecraft out to the asteroid. The mission will arrive at Psyche sometime in 2029, where it will spend another 26 months orbiting and surveying the space rock, analyzing its surface composition, mapping its gravity, and measuring any magnetic field that it might possess.
Scientists at MIT are leading Psyche’s magnetic field and gravity studies. And, the mission as a whole has a history that traces back to MIT. Psyche’s principal investigator is MIT alumna and former professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton ’87, SM ’87, PhD ’02, now a professor at Arizona State University, while its deputy principal investigator is Benjamin Weiss, an MIT professor of planetary science. In her role as mission PI, Elkins-Tanton, who is also vice president of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative, is leading a team including longtime MIT colleagues on the first mission to a metal world.
“Being able to undertake fundamental exploration of a new kind of world is a thrill and a privilege beyond anything I had envisioned for my life,” Elkins-Tanton says. “But the best part of it is helping to create and support a huge team of people who are all on this journey together.”
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft aims to journey to an asteroid believed to be made mostly of metal. This unique exploration could provide insights into the early days of planet formation. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
A Hypothesis on Psyche’s Origin
Scientists have hypothesized that Psyche may represent a case of planetary arrested development. While Earth and other rocky planets continued to accumulate material around their metal-rich cores some 4.5 billion years ago, Psyche may have met an untimely end, sustaining multiple collisions that blew off its rocky surface, leaving behind a naked metallic core. That core, scientists believe, could retain the elements that also formed Earth’s center.
“This will be the first time we’ve sent a mission to a body that is not mostly rock or ice, but metal,” Weiss says. “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.”
The seeds of a mission to explore an asteroid like Psyche were planted during a chance conversation between Weiss and Elkins-Tanton in 2010 at MIT. At the time, Elkins-Tanton was a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and had just finished teaching for the day.
“As she was passing by my office, I said, ‘Hey, do you have a minute?’” Weiss recalls.
Weiss was studying samples of Allende, a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1969 as a shower of fragments. The samples appeared to be magnetized, but also curiously unmelted. Weiss wondered how such a body could have become magnetized without any sign of the melting and churning that typically produces magnetic fields in space.
NASA’s Psyche Mission is set to explore the metal-rich asteroid, Psyche, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe this asteroid might be the exposed core of an early planet, offering clues about the formation of Earth’s own core. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Having just lectured on the topic of melting cores and planet formation, Elkins-Tanton offered an idea: When a planet first forms, it is little more than an accumulation of unmelted rock and dust. As more material smashes into the infant planet, the collisions jostle the innermost regions, producing a melted, churning core, surrounded by unmelted material. The molten, swirling core could spin up a magnetic field, that could imprint upon a planet’s outer, unmelted layers.
Perhaps, the two realized, Allende’s magnetized, unmelted fragments came from the outer layer of a planetismal, or early planet, that harbored a melted, magnetic core. If that were the case, then perhaps other meteorite fragments are also remnants of early, differentiated planets.
“Hearing Ben talk about his shocking discovery of magnetism in the Allende meteorite, and then immediately having a mental model of the physics and chemistry of formation that could have led to that, was just a moment of pure joy,” Elkins-Tanton says of their realization.
She and Weiss wrote up their ideas in two 2011 papers. Then, the engineers came knocking.
“Lindy got a call from JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory),” Weiss says. “They’d read the paper and said, ‘This is really cool. Is there a way you could test this idea, that you could partially melt bodies, and magnetize meteorites?’”
The call set off a series of brainstorming back-and-forths that eventually developed into a mission concept: to send a spacecraft to explore an ancient planetary core. The asteroid Psyche, they realized, was their best shot, as it’s relatively close to Earth and has shown signs of metal-rich, core-like content.
An Asteroid’s Field
In 2017, the team’s proposal for a mission to Psyche was greenlit as part of NASA’s Discovery Program. Elkins-Tanton, who had since moved to ASU, became head of the mission, while Weiss; Maria Zuber, MIT’s E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and vice president for research; and others at MIT joined the mission’s science team. Together, the scientists and engineers at JPL planned out the hardware that a spacecraft would need in order to determine whether Psyche is a metal-rich core.
Celebrating successful completion of environmental testing of the @MissionToPsyche spacecraft with mission PI and former student @ltelkins ! pic.twitter.com/U3YueLJRA7
— Maria Zuber (@maria_zuber) April 16, 2022
They decided on three instruments: a magnetometer that will look for signs of an ancient magnetic field that could be imprinted in Psyche’s surface layers; a pair of cameras that will take images and spot any visual signs of metal on Psyche’s surface; and a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer that will measure the asteroid’s emissions of neutrons and gamma rays. These measurements can tell scientists whether and which metallic elements lie on its surface.
The spacecraft will also carry a communications system, which will mainly be used to send data and receive commands in the form of radio waves. A science team led by Zuber will also use the system to carry out a gravity study. The team will analyze the radio waves as the spacecraft orbits the asteroid, to see how they and the spacecraft are influenced by the asteroid’s gravitational pull. These analyses will help the scientists map Psyche’s gravity field, which can then determine the asteroid’s mass and how likely that mass is made of metal.
The magnetometer investigation is led by Weiss and involves others at MIT. The instrument was designed and built by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark. The team worked with JPL engineers to refine the magnetometer’s design, which consists of two sensors installed on an arm-like boom — a configuration that will help the instrument pick up any magnetic signal from the asteroid itself, amid the “noise” from the spacecraft, its solar panels, and its surroundings.
To interpret whatever magnetic field the magnetometer does pick up from Psyche, the MIT team has developed a “library” of simulated magnetic field patterns.
A Look Ahead
“Space is filled with magnetic fields coming from planets, our own sun, and the solar wind,” says MIT Research Scientist Rona Oran. “Our simulation library will allow us to examine different scenarios, so that when we get to Psyche, we’ll use those tools to derive the asteroid’s actual, real field.”
In fact, the team will have many chances to refine the library, and their understanding of the magnetic fields around the spacecraft, as it makes its way to the asteroid. Soon after Psyche launches, engineers will turn on the magnetometer, which will then continuously measure the magnetic fields around the spacecraft, throughout its journey. These data will regularly downlink to JPL and be transmited to two data processing centers at MIT, where Oran, Weiss, and others will use the data to hone their understanding of what they might find around the asteroid itself.
“This is the first time our group has led a science investigation on a spacecraft,” Weiss says. “Once the mission launches, we’re on the hotseat to run this. It’s a big responsibility, and also incredibly exciting.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
