This asteroid could make us all billionaires! (video)

No, not some asteroid that has turned into a Nigerian prince, but a NASA mission that can solve the problems of Earth’s mineral wealth.

The asteroid called Psyche is 224 kilometers wide and its orbit around the Sun is located somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. But the most impressive feature is that it is largely composed of different minerals. As with planets with an iron-nickel core at their center, this asteroid, possibly the core of an ancient planet, has rich ore at its center. Because it is an asteroid and not a planet, this ore is very close to the surface, if not visible to the naked eye, something can also come out of its exploitation for us.

To give you a measure of what we’re talking about, Psyche contains an ore consisting of iron, nickel, and gold worth approximately 10.5 million, a sum if distributed to the inhabitants of the Earth that would make each of us a billionaire without exception. In theory, if we could mine all that ore it would completely change the way we think about economics, but NASA has set its sights on the soul for another reason.

The study of the Earth’s core is one of the greatest unfulfilled curiosities of the scientific community and access to it is objectively impossible by the means at our disposal. In the form Psyche is now, it’s more like giving us a snapshot of the Earth’s core without having to dig too deep, and that precise snapshot is the goal of NASA’s ambitious new mission.

The Psyche study has the same name as this study, Psyche, and it’s a project that’s been underway since 2017. But we now have a date for the launch of the unmanned mission that will explore the asteroid’s surface. On October 23, 2023, the new chapter of the Discovery Program will begin. The results of the mission may not make us instant billionaires, but we will become wiser about how a large and invisible part of our planet works, and that knowledge may be more valuable.