Overview
- The Psyche spacecraft flew within about 2,864 miles (4,609 km) of Mars on May 15 and used the planet’s gravity to boost its speed by roughly 1,000 miles per hour and tilt its orbital plane by about 1 degree.
- Engineers confirmed the maneuver by analyzing Doppler and radio tracking from NASA’s Deep Space Network, which showed the craft is on the planned trajectory toward asteroid 16 Psyche for a mid/late 2029 rendezvous.
- Teams powered up all science instruments during the encounter as a rehearsal, capturing thousands of images that mission scientists are now using to calibrate the multispectral imager, magnetometers, and the gamma‑ray and neutron spectrometer.
- Psyche returned striking views that include a bright, extended crescent of Mars, an enhanced‑color image of Huygens crater, and the mission’s highest‑resolution view yet of Mars’ south polar ice cap at roughly 0.7 miles (1.1 km) per pixel.
- Early magnetometer readings may show Mars’ bow shock, a preliminary finding under active analysis, and the team has resumed ion‑propulsion cruising toward the main belt while processing the flyby data to prepare for asteroid operations.