Overview
- Psyche, which will skim past Mars on Friday, is set to gain speed and bend its path toward the metal‑rich asteroid Psyche for a planned 2029 arrival.
- Mission planners expect the spacecraft to pass about 2,800 miles above the planet at roughly 12,333 mph, using gravity to change both speed and flight plane.
- NASA released a colorized image shot May 3 from about 3 million miles showing Mars as a thin crescent, with brightness extended by dust scattering and a gap near the winter north polar cap that specialists think may be due to seasonal clouds and haze.
- Approach imaging that began appearing in the public archive May 7 is feeding a calibration campaign that includes thousands of observations, faint‑dust searches, and moonlet‑search drills the team will later repeat at the asteroid.
- Psyche’s magnetometer and its gamma‑ray and neutron spectrometer will record how Mars redirects charged particles and how cosmic‑ray counts shift, while the Deep Space Network tracks radio signals to verify the flyby’s trajectory change.