Overview
- Psyche captured a colorized view of Mars as a thin crescent on May 3, 2026 from about 3 million miles away, using a panchromatic filter with a 2 millisecond exposure.
- Psyche will skim past Mars on May 15 for a gravity assist that redirects the spacecraft toward its metal‑rich target in the asteroid belt, with the pass expected to occur about 2,800 miles above the surface at roughly 12,333 mph.
- The crescent looks extended because sunlight scatters off dust in Mars’s atmosphere, and a faint gap near the north polar cap may reflect seasonal clouds or hazes that block some scattered light.
- Mission teams plan thousands of observations during approach and departure to calibrate the multispectral imager, search for faint dust and small moons, and collect magnetic and particle data with the magnetometer and the gamma‑ray and neutron spectrometer.
- NASA launched Psyche on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on October 13, 2023, and the probe is cruising on solar‑electric propulsion toward an arrival at asteroid Psyche in 2029.