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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft. NASA/Ben Smegelsky
NASA’s Pysche mission is on its way to explore the metal rich asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter called, not surprisingly Psyche. The intriguing thing about the asteroid is that it seems to be the iron rich core of an unformed planet. The spacecraft carried a wealth of scientific instruments to explore the asteroid including an imaging rig, gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, magnetometer and an X-band Gravity platform.
Asteroid Psuche was discovered in March 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis. Because he discovered it, he was allowed to name it and settled on Psyche after the Greek goddess of the soul. It orbits the Sun at a distance of between 378 million to 497 million kilometres and takes about 5 Earth years to complete an orbit.
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Laser on NASA's Psyche asteroid probe beams data from 140 million miles awayMonisha Ravisetti is Space.com's Astronomy Editor. She covers black holes, star explosions, gravitational waves, exoplanet discoveries and other enigmas hidden across the fabric of space and time. Previously, she was a science writer at CNET, and before that, reported for The Academic Times.
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Psyche spacecraft sends data back to Earth using lasers for the first timeNASA's experimental laser communication system, riding along with the Psyche spacecraft, has transmitted Psyche data from over 140 million miles away.
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Voyager 1 is sending data back to Earth for the first time in 5 monthsVoyager 1 is currently about 15 billion miles away, and at 46 years old, the probe has shown multiple quirks and signs of aging in recent years.
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Voyager 1 is sending data back to Earth for the first time in 5 monthsEngineers finally received a status update from the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after identifying the cause of the aging probe’s five-month communication issue.
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