00:04Out in the solar system, there's still a class of cosmic objects we've never closely examined.
00:09Metallic asteroids. They're orbiting the sun out there in the vacuum of space.
00:12But now NASA scientists say they could also tell us a whole lot about our own home.
00:17We're pretty sure we have a good idea of what's going on inside the Earth.
00:20That is, a solid iron-nickel core with a surrounding molten layer made out of the same material,
00:24but without observing it or something extremely similar to it with our own scientific lens.
00:28We can't be sure. That's where NASA's Psyche mission comes in,
00:32where the Space Administration is planning to send a spacecraft to land on the Psyche asteroid.
00:36Psyche is the largest metallic asteroid we know of,
00:39which Jim Bell, who is working with NASA on the project, says is around the width of Massachusetts.
00:44Asteroids of this size are scientifically important because they are often remnants of our early solar system's development
00:49when the planets were formed, and experts believe that Psyche may have at one point been the core of a
00:54planet.
00:54NASA's mission, which is hoping to figure that out, is set to take off in October,
00:58and will travel an immense 2.5 billion miles before arriving at the asteroid in August 2029.
01:04It will study Psyche for 26 months, hoping to glean not only its composition and origin,
01:09but also figure out if it was once a planetary core,
01:12perhaps also telling us something about what's going on under our own feet.
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