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

“As a bonus, it captured Mars images from a rare perspective,” NASA said in a press release.

The spacecraft approached Mars from a high phase angle, or from the side opposite the Sun, making the planet appear as a thin crescent as Psyche moved in for the encounter. The wispiness of the thin Martian atmosphere was on full display, with sunlight shining through diffuse clouds of dust suspended dozens of miles over the sharp edge of the planet’s rust-colored surface.

As Psyche zoomed past the red planet, its cameras captured a wide-angle overhead view of Mars’ southern polar ice cap. Jim Bell, who leads the Psyche imager instrument team at Arizona State University, said the spacecraft took thousands of images during the encounter. The observations will help scientists “calibrate and characterize” the performance of the cameras, Bell said.

Psyche’s magnetometer may have detected a signature of the solar wind interacting with Mars’ upper atmosphere or its remnant magnetic field, and its spectrometers were tuned to measure the chemical composition of the Martian surface underneath the spacecraft’s flight path.

Numerous other missions are exploring Mars full-time, so there’s little chance of any major discoveries lurking in Psyche’s flyby datasets. But scientists should be able to calibrate the mission’s instruments by comparing flyby observations with archival data from other Mars missions.

It is always interesting to gain new perspectives, even on something familiar. You can’t see a crescent Mars from Earth. But the Psyche mission’s real payoff will come in three years, when the probe pulls in close to asteroid Psyche, an object the size of Massachusetts that is rich in iron, nickel, and likely other metals that we know only as a fuzzy blob through telescopes. It is truly uncharted territory, but the Psyche spacecraft will have more than two years to survey the asteroid, far longer than the fleeting glimpse it got of Mars last week.