PSYCHE THE GOLDEN ASTEROID 700 TRILLION DOLLARS OF GOLD AND PLATINUM ON AN ASTEROID.
This extraordinary asteroid is 5 years away from Earth at an orbital mass of (ρ)3,990 ± 260 kg/m3
It is made up of the most important natural treasure, and constitutes the most extraordinary discovery ever made by man in the solar system so far.
The northern hemisphere of Psyche was imaged using SPHERE, the Very Large Telescope imager.
These observations revealed two notable regions: a dark one near the equator and a bright one near the pole. These two regions seem to correspond to craters, unofficially named Meroe (Meroe) and Panthia (Panthia), after the twin witches in the Metamorphoses, the Latin novel by Apuleius
It is composed of 75% iron and rare elements of the periodic table, and in particular elements such as gold, platinum, nickel or other extremely rare metals...
But it is gold that after iron, which represents the greatest wealth of this asteroid, there is a lot, a lot of gold, assure NASA engineers.
Probably hundreds of billions of tons of gold form part of this 200 kilometer diameter asteroid...
Metallic asteroids appeared very early in the history of the solar system, when planets were beginning to form. They are actually the cores of protoplanets whose rocky outer layers have been expelled during a collision with another asteroid or a planetesimal. Real balls of molten metal when they were born, they would then have quickly cooled.
Enough for a solid crust to form on their surface. Previous measurements made from Earth on the surface of Psyche indicated that it was indeed mostly composed of metal (iron and nickel), leading astronomers to classify the object as a metallic asteroid.
However, measurements of Psyche's mass and density since then tell a different story. The way its gravity interacts with nearby bodies suggests that the asteroid is much less dense than it would be if it were just a large, solid block of iron.
The hypothesis then put forward is that Psyche is very porous like an enormous ball of metallic wool containing matter and empty spaces in equal parts. "What we wanted to do with this study was to see if it's possible for an iron body the size of Psyche to maintain this nearly 50% porosity," said Fiona Nichols-Fleming, lead author of the study published in the Geophysical Research Letters.
This celestial fortune is estimated at the colossal sum of 700 trillion dollars, or the equivalent of 93 billion dollars per earthling.
NASA will launch very soon (AUGUST 2022) a probe which will reach its orbit in 2026, which will make it possible to undertake the first evaluations of a future exploration and perhaps exploitation of this gigantic source of supply of precious metal.
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A trillion is the natural number equal to 1018 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) on the long scale, i.e. one thousand billion or one billion billion....