On the morning of October 12, if all goes as planned, NASA will send a high-tech spacecraft called Psyche on a 2.2 billion-mile journey to the intriguing asteroid of the same name. To be clear, the asteroid is known as 16 Psyche.

The goal of the Psyche mission is to study this space rock in detail, as not only is it believed to be very rich in metal, but it is also suggested that it is actually the remnants of the iron core of what was once an entire planet. . And potentially the core Soil made of similar material – so 16 Psyche could offer us a direct tunnel to the center of our world, to a place we could not otherwise reach.

But before this mission begins, scientists are using other mechanisms to examine the 140-mile-wide space rock. So we can know what’s in store for NASA’s spacecraft when it arrives in 2029. In fact, a team at the Southwest Research Institute recently announced some results they collected about the asteroid. These are the results they collected using two powerful infrared instruments: the groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the now-defunct Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).

Infrared sensors, unlike standard optical sensors, can observe data in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light associated with this area is actually invisible to the human eye. Naturally, we can only see a small portion of the spectrum, known as the visible region. But this is why infrared astronomy is so important; It can help reveal parts of the universe that are often invisible to us and our regular old telescopes. Source