PASADENA, California, June 4, 2026, 03:01 PDT
NASA says its Psyche spacecraft picked up a 1,000 mph speed increase and adjusted its trajectory by nearly 1 degree after skimming past Mars. On May 15, Psyche swung within 2,864 miles (4,609 km) of the planet, setting it firmly on track for its asteroid destination.
Psyche still has a long way to go before reaching its target, a metal-rich asteroid sitting in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. The recent gravity assist — essentially borrowing a planet’s pull to tweak the probe’s speed and trajectory, all while saving xenon propellant — trimmed the fuel demands for the 2.2 billion-mile journey, which started back in October 2023.
The flyby doubled as a trial. NASA powered up Psyche’s full suite—cameras, magnetometers, gamma-ray and neutron spectrometers—to get everything calibrated ahead of the spacecraft’s planned arrival at the asteroid in 2029.
Don Han, Psyche’s navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the agency’s update that while the team trusted the calculations and flight plan, monitoring the Doppler signal from the Deep Space Network during the flyby was still “exciting.” The Deep Space Network, NASA’s worldwide array of antennas, handles communications with spacecraft operating far from Earth. NASA
Pictures weren’t just thrown in—they add, but there’s more going on. NASA’s new batch features an enhanced-color look at Huygens, a double-ring crater spanning roughly 290 miles (470 km). The color shifts? Probably from dust, sand, and bedrock marking out old terrain.
Psyche grabbed its sharpest image yet of Mars’ water-ice-packed south polar cap, according to NASA. That cap covers over 430 miles. This shot came in after the closest pass on May 15, around 1:53 p.m. PDT.
The third image? Wind streaks stretch across impact craters in Mars’ Syrtis Major. Some of those streaks go for roughly 30 miles. Nearby, larger craters near the center-bottom of the shot measure out to an average diameter matching that—about 30 miles.
Jim Bell, who heads up the Psyche imager instrument team at Arizona State University, called the trove of Mars images “unique and important opportunities” to put the camera hardware and initial image-processing tech through their paces. During the flyby, NASA’s Perseverance rover, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and ESA’s Mars Express all contributed related data. NASA
Psyche, the target of the mission, stands out thanks to its suspected high metal content. Scientists believe it could be the exposed core of a planetesimal—essentially, an early planet’s building block. NASA expects the spacecraft to reach the asteroid by August 2029, kicking off roughly two years of mapping and composition analysis.
Psyche stands apart from other asteroid missions of recent years. Instead of bringing back samples or nudging an asteroid off course, this probe will orbit a metallic body—one that no previous spacecraft has ever studied up close.
The bigger challenge looms. Psyche still has to get back on solar-electric propulsion, a low-thrust setup that relies on electricity to accelerate xenon gas, and keep functioning during over three years of deep-space cruising before it can enter orbit. Navigation, comms, and instrument reliability remain the main risk factors.
