NASA is investigating the most valuable rock in our Solar System

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find out what is near – a concept with which NASA is certainly familiar.

This morning, the space agency is scheduled to launch a six-year, 2.2 billion-mile expedition to a resource-rich asteroid named Psyche in a bid to learn more about the core of our own planet. And scientists are pretty – forgive us – Psyche’d about it.

🤔 Why so Psyche’d?... Psyche is a potato-like asteroid measuring roughly 173 miles long and 144 miles across, located in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Its exact composition is unclear, but scientists theorize between 30%–60% of Psyche is made up of iron and nickel, similar to the Earth’s core – which would be highly unusual, since asteroids typically contain mostly ice and rock.

• This theory leads researchers to believe Psyche represents the shattered remnants of an early planet that never got a chance to form, making it an ideal target for learning more about the Earth’s core and how our planet first formed.

🤯 Fun fact: If scientists’ hypothesis about Psyche’s composition holds true, it would mean the asteroid holds several quintillion dollars worth of iron and nickel (here’s what one quintillion looks like: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) – or more metal than an album containing all of Metallica, Korn, Black Sabbath, and Slipknot‘s greatest hits. Though, since that figure is at least 10,000x larger than the entire world economy, the metals wouldn’t actually sell for that price if they reached the open market.

☄️📰 In other groundbreaking, asteroid-related news… NASA revealed yesterday that rock and soil samples collected from the asteroid Bennu are carbon-rich and contain water-bearing clay minerals dating back to the birth of our Solar System – which together could indicate that asteroids like Bennu first delivered the building blocks of life to Earth.