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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is planning a close encounter with a very unique asteroid that may be worth $10,000 quadrillion (£7,700 quadrillion). 

If you're wondering, one quadrillion is equivalent to 1,000 trillion.

A potato-shaped asteroid, with the unlikely name of 16 Psyche, might be worth more than all of Earth’s global economy, which is worth an estimated $360.6 trillion in 2019.  

An Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovered 16  Psyche on Mar. 17, 1852. 

The asteroid was named after Psyche, from the classic Roman mythology. Psyche married Cupid but was put to death by Venus at Cupid’s request to save his love. Jupiter made Psyche immortal.

The asteroid's name is appropriate since 16 Psyche is really a “dead” star that is still in orbit. For all practical purposes, it may be immortal.

The value of 16 Psyche is in its composition

Most asteroids are composed of rock and/or ice. But based on a series of recent scans conducted with the Hubble Space Telescope, asteroid 16 Psyche is thought to consist of nickel and iron. The value is based on the volume of just the iron ore in 16 Psyche. There is no way to evaluate the amount of nickel that’s in the mix.

16 Psyche is only 140 miles in diameter, but that is a massive amount of expensive ores. It is one of the biggest objects in the asteroid belts that are orbiting between Jupiter and Mars. 

Dr. Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute, explained, “We've seen meteorites that are mostly metal, but Psyche could be unique, in that it might be an asteroid that is totally made of iron and nickel.”

The Psyche mission plan

The Psyche mission is set to launch in August 2022 and will arrive at the asteroid orbit in early 2026.  The mission's main objective is "to determine whether Psyche 16 is indeed the core of a planet-sized object," It "will be the first mission to investigate a world of metal rather than of rock and ice."

The Psyche spaceship will try to merge into the asteroid's orbit for 21 months. The unmanned flight will map and study everything about 16 Psyche, then send all its findings home to earth. 

The mission will use a multispectral imager, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer, and a radio instrument (for gravity measurement).

It will also test a sophisticated new laser communication technology. Rather than radio-waves, it encodes data in photons for communication between a probe in deep space, and the Earth. Using light-waves instead of radio-waves enables the spacecraft to communicate with more data more quickly than in the past. 

Despite the potential value of the 16 Psyche, there is still no plan to mine the asteroid.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) team is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.

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