NASA's Psyche mission: New spacecraft will visit a giant asteroid to tell us more about Earth

NASA's latest deep space mission will analyse a metal-rich asteroid to unlock a greater understanding of how rocky planets like our own were formed.

Transcript

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00:14 >> The rocky planets that we know of, the Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars,

00:20 and the Moon, all have got a metal core in their center.

00:24 And especially for the Earth, it's the source of our magnetic field,

00:28 which may be tied to holding onto our atmosphere and making our planet habitable.

00:33 There's a lot of study that's going on to understand that.

00:36 But we don't know a lot about our core.

00:38 What we've learned about it, we learn indirectly, because we can't go there.

00:42 And so Psyche gives us the opportunity to visit a core,

00:46 the only way that humankind can ever do.

00:49 And so we hope to learn something about what's inside the Earth

00:52 and other rocky planets by visiting Psyche.

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01:24 >> This is a really incredible spacecraft that's going

01:27 to help us do some really fundamental exploration.

01:30 We're going to be going to an asteroid that's never been visited before.

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