NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe beams home haunting view of distant Earth (photo)
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is headed toward a big and bizarre metal asteroid, has delivered a stunning perspective of our home planet from deep space.
Psyche launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2023 with the objective of visiting the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, which is believed to be the exposed core of a demolished planetesimal, or tiny planet.
This past July, as part of periodic testing and calibration of Psyche‘s science instruments during its cruise phase, the probe’s team had it look back at Earth, which was then around 180 million miles (290 kilometers) away.
The result of long-exposure shots taken on July 20 and July 23 is a thought-provoking image of Earth and the moon amid a stellar backdrop, providing a rare perspective of the Earth’s place in space. The brightness of Earth and moon comes from reflected sunlight, set among stars belonging to the constellation Aries.
The image demonstrates the performance of the spacecraft’s twin cameras. Its multispectral imager is designed to detect different wavelengths of light, as the spectral signatures from light that reflects off 16 Psyche can be used to learn about the asteroid’s composition. For last month’s imaging test, Earth and the moon, shining with reflected sunlight, provided a useful target, but the team may choose more distant objects in the future.
“After this, we may look at Saturn or [the huge asteroid] Vesta to help us continue to test the imagers,” Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University in Tempe, said in a statement. The imager has previously also been trained on Jupiter and Mars.
“We’re sort of collecting solar system ‘trading cards’ from these different bodies and running them through our calibration pipeline to make sure we’re getting the right answers,” Bell said.
Psyche is currently on its way to Mars, and will use the Red Planet for a gravitational slingshot maneuver in spring 2026 to send it toward 16 Psyche. If all goes well, the probe will arrive at the metallic asteroid in 2029.