Wendy K. Caldwell is a mathematician/planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is the lead author of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Psyche research and a member of the DART Investigation Team, a multi-agency international collaboration. She is also a regular human being who volunteers her time acting, dancing, directing, and choreographing for local performing arts organizations. Caldwell contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
This summer, NASA will launch its first mission to a metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Previous missions have explored rocky and icy asteroids, but Psyche’s composition is widely believed to consist of a considerable amount of metal. Of course, in today’s click-bait culture, googling Psyche will take you down the proverbial internet rabbit hole of stories about how it is worth more than the global economy. As enticing as that idea is, we are not going to scrap it and sell it for parts.
From a scientific perspective, though, Psyche is priceless.
To read more, click here.