By Steve GormanLOS ANGELES, May 14 (Reuters) – NASA’s Psyche probe was headed for a close encounter with Mars on Friday and a planned gravity boost to set the spacecraft on its final course to the solar system’s largest known metallic asteroid, thought to be the remnant core of an ancient protoplanet.The Psyche probe, named for the asteroid it was designed to explore, was launched in October 2023 on a planned voyage of 2.2 billion miles and is expected to reach its destination on the outer fringes of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in about three years.AdvertisementAdvertisementOn Friday, the spacecraft is expected to pass within 2,800 miles (4,500 km) of Mars at 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph) as it harnesses the gravitational pull of the Red Planet to speed up and adjust the probe’s trajectory en route to its asteroid target, according to NASA.The Mars slingshot flyby was built into the Psyche flight plan as a way of conserving its supply of xenon gas propellant in the vehicle’s solar-electric ion thruster system, being used for the first time on an interplanetary space mission.But Psyche’s operations team also planned to use the Martian encounter to practice with and to calibrate the probe’s science instruments, including special cameras designed to capture images of objects in different wavelengths of light.”We are now exactly on target for the flyby,” Sarah Bairstow, the Psyche mission planning chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laborato …
