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Boosted by jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi"):
astropartigirl@threads.net ("Sophia Gad-Nasr") wrote:
TODAY in less than an hour, NASA's Psyche spacecraft will fly just 2,800 miles above Mars, using it as a gravitational slingshot toward one of the solar system's WEIRDEST objects: asteroid (16) Psyche, which may be the exposed core of a planetesimal smashed billions of years ago! Psyche launched in 2023 using efficient Hall-effect thrusters that gradually accelerate it. But the asteroid's orbit is angled off the solar system' plane, so the spacecraft needs more speed and a trajectory tilt!
Attachments:
- gifv: 8d969270b32d8d14.mp4