Pasadena, California, June 6, 2026, 07:02 PDT
NASA’s Psyche probe has swung past Mars, completing its gravity-assist slingshot on May 15—brushing just 2,864 miles above the Martian surface and sending back new shots of the Red Planet. That maneuver didn’t just juice its speed for the long trip to a metal-rich asteroid; it doubled as a shakeout for the science instruments, giving engineers a live-fire test ahead of the main mission.
Psyche just cleared its final big planetary handoff ahead of the 2029 asteroid rendezvous. NASA expects the spacecraft to fall under asteroid Psyche’s gravity by late July 2029, kicking off its main mission a month later. For roughly two years, Psyche will snap photos, chart the asteroid’s terrain and analyze its makeup.
This wasn’t about Mars—just a calculated fuel-saving flyby. By leveraging the planet’s gravity, the spacecraft grabbed a speed and trajectory boost. “Exactly on target,” said Sarah Bairstow, who handles mission planning for Psyche at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ahead of the maneuver. Reuters
JPL said later that NASA’s Deep Space Network had verified the outcome. Don Han, who heads Psyche navigation at JPL, reported the spacecraft remains “on course” for its 2029 target. Jim Bell of Arizona State University, overseeing the camera instrument, described the recent Mars findings as “unique and important opportunities” for calibration. “Onward to the asteroid Psyche!” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the mission. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Psyche’s first big observation came in the form of an image: Mars, a thin crescent, appeared just ahead of closest approach. That geometry — a result of a high phase angle between the Sun, Mars, and the spacecraft — gave the planet its sharp crescent look. Unexpectedly, Martian atmospheric dust scattered sunlight more intensely than researchers had predicted.
Some of the images leaned technical. NASA shared an enhanced-color shot of Huygens crater, a natural-color view capturing wind streaks sweeping over craters in Syrtis Major, and a detailed image of Mars’ south polar cap—rich in water ice and spanning over 430 miles.
The test extended to the whole payload. Psyche is outfitted with two multispectral cameras, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer, and an instrument for radio-based gravity science. Tucked on board as well: NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment—essentially a laser comms demo, designed to prove deep-space missions can push more data than radio by itself.
The bigger question is still open. Asteroid Psyche looks packed with nickel and iron—it might even be a chunk of a protoplanet’s core. But that’s only a theory for now; the mission aims to find out if that’s actually true. Should Psyche prove to be less like an exposed core, researchers will pivot: the focus would shift from peering into planetary guts to unraveling a more chaotic tale of metals, stony debris and ancient impacts.
Psyche is threading its path through a busy slate of asteroid missions, but its target stands apart. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is on course for Jupiter’s Trojans, while OSIRIS-REx—now OSIRIS-APEx—shifted focus after delivering Bennu samples. The European Space Agency’s Hera is en route to the binary asteroid system hit by NASA’s DART. Where Psyche stands out: it’s set to become the first mission to get an up-close look at a metal-rich asteroid.
