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This is the first view of a nearly \u201cfull Mars\u201d as seen by NASA\u2019s Psyche spacecraft shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the south polar cap northwards to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.<\/p>\n
\n Credit:
\n NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/ASU\n <\/p>\n
\n This is the first view of a nearly \u201cfull Mars\u201d as seen by NASA\u2019s Psyche spacecraft shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the south polar cap northwards to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.<\/p>\n
Credit:<\/p>\n
NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/ASU<\/p>\n
As Psyche zoomed past the red planet, its cameras captured a wide-angle overhead view of Mars\u2019 southern polar ice cap. Jim Bell, who leads the Psyche imager instrument team at Arizona State University, said the spacecraft took thousands of images during the encounter. The observations will help scientists \u201ccalibrate and characterize\u201d the performance of the cameras, Bell said.<\/p>\n
Psyche\u2019s magnetometer may have detected a signature of the solar wind interacting with Mars\u2019 upper atmosphere or its remnant magnetic field, and its spectrometers were tuned to measure the chemical composition of the Martian surface underneath the spacecraft\u2019s flight path.<\/p>\n
Numerous other missions are exploring Mars full-time, so there\u2019s little chance of any major discoveries lurking in Psyche\u2019s flyby datasets. But scientists should be able to calibrate the mission\u2019s instruments by comparing flyby observations with archival data from other Mars missions.<\/p>\n
It is always interesting to gain new perspectives, even on something familiar. You can\u2019t see a crescent Mars from Earth. But the Psyche mission\u2019s real payoff will come in three years, when the probe pulls in close to asteroid Psyche, an object the size of Massachusetts that is rich in iron, nickel, and likely other metals that we know only as a fuzzy blob through telescopes. It is truly uncharted territory, but the Psyche spacecraft will have more than two years to survey the asteroid, far longer than the fleeting glimpse it got of Mars last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs a bonus, it captured Mars images from a rare perspective,\u201d NASA said in a press release. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-437401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}