NASA's Psyche spacecraft returns unfamiliar views of a familiar world

Key points

• Not quite halfway through a si year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System’s largest metal asteroid in 2029. The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche.
• The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
• It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
• A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch.
• Navigators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it...