{"id":12364,"date":"2025-08-20T21:11:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T21:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/12364\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T21:11:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T21:11:10","slug":"psyche-beams-back-images-of-earth-and-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/12364\/","title":{"rendered":"Psyche Beams Back Images of Earth and Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

On July 20 and July 23, 2025, NASA\u2019s Psyche spacecraft looked back toward home and captured images of Earth and our Moon from about 290 million km (180 million miles) away. The spacecraft\u2019s twin cameras captured multiple long-exposure pictures of the two bodies, which appear as dots sparkling with reflected sunlight amid a starfield in the constellation of Aries.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Psyche<\/a><\/p>\n

Psyche captured images of Earth and our Moon from about 290 million km (180 million miles) away in July 2025, as it calibrated its imager instrument. Image credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech \/ ASU.<\/p>\n

Psyche<\/a> is a NASA mission to study a metal-rich asteroid with the same name, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.<\/p>\n

This is NASA\u2019s first mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice.<\/p>\n

Psyche launched October 13, 2023, at 10:19 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center.<\/p>\n

By August 2029, the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid that scientists think \u2014 because of its high metal content \u2014 may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Psyche multispectral imager instrument comprises a pair of identical cameras equipped with filters and telescopic lenses to photograph the asteroid Psyche\u2019s surface in different wavelengths of light,\u201d members of the mission\u2019s science team said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe color and shape of a planetary body\u2019s spectrum can reveal details about what it\u2019s made of.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Moon and the giant asteroid Vesta, for example, have similar kinds of \u2018bumps and wiggles\u2019 in their spectra that scientists could potentially also detect at Psyche.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scientists are interested in Psyche because it will help them better understand the formation of rocky planets with metallic cores, including Earth.<\/p>\n

When choosing targets for the imager testing and calibration, they look for bodies that shine with reflected sunlight, just as the asteroid Psyche does.<\/p>\n

They also look at objects that have a spectrum they\u2019re familiar with, so they can compare previous telescopic or spacecraft data from those objects with what Psyche\u2019s instruments observe.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Psyche turned its lenses toward Jupiter and Mars for calibration \u2014 each has a spectrum more reddish than the bluer tones of Earth. That checkout also proved a success.<\/p>\n

To determine whether the imager\u2019s performance is changing, the researchers also compare data from the different tests.<\/p>\n

That way, when the spacecraft slips into orbit around Psyche, they can be sure that the instrument behaves as expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter this, we may look at Saturn or Vesta to help us continue to test the imagers,\u201d said Dr. Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re sort of collecting solar system \u2018trading cards\u2019 from these different bodies and running them through our calibration pipeline to make sure we\u2019re getting the right answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The imager wasn\u2019t the only instrument that got a successful checkout in July 2025.<\/p>\n

The mission team also put the spacecraft\u2019s magnetometer and the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer through a gamut of tests \u2014 something they do every six months.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are up and running, and everything is working well,\u201d said Dr. Bob Mase, the mission\u2019s project manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re on target to fly by Mars in May 2026, and we are accomplishing all of our planned activities for cruise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat flyby is the spacecraft\u2019s next big milestone, when it will use the Red Planet\u2019s gravity as a slingshot to help the spacecraft get to the asteroid Psyche.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat will mark Psyche\u2019s first of two planned loops around the Solar System and 1.6 billion km (1 billion miles) since launching from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in October 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On July 20 and July 23, 2025, NASA\u2019s Psyche spacecraft looked back toward home and captured images of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[1204,6599,18,19,17,10626,11762,133,10214],"class_list":{"0":"post-12364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-planet","9":"tag-earth","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-moon","14":"tag-psyche-spacecraft","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-solar-system"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}