Getting off to a ground-shaking start, NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe roared into space atop a Falcon Heavy rocket Friday, setting off on a 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.

“We’re going to learn about a previously unstudied ingredient that went into making our habitable Earth, and that is the metal that is now in the Earth’s core and the cores of all of the rocky planets, cores that we can never visit but of course that we want to learn about,” said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

“And Psyche is the single largest metallic object in our solar system. So if we want to learn about our cores, that’s where we need to go.”

After multiple setbacks and delays in the wake of the COVID pandemic — and a final 24-hour slip due to stormy weather Thursday — the Psyche mission finally got under way at 10:19 a.m. EDT when the SpaceX Falcon Heavy’s 27 first-stage engines ignited with a thundering rush of flaming exhaust.

After a final round of computer checks, the 230-foot-tall rocket was released from historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, smoothly climbing away atop more than 5 million pounds of thrust.

The Falcon Heavy’s two strap-on side boosters were programmed to shut down and peel away two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, flying back to side-by-side landings at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The central core booster was expected to continuing firing another minute and a half before handing off to the rocket’s second stage.

The flight plan called for the 6,000-pound Psyche probe to separate and fly away on its own an hour after launch, kicking off a five-and-a-half-year voyage to the asteroid it was named after.

Discovered in 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, Psyche is the largest of nine known metal-rich asteroids, orbiting in the outer asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter three times farther from the sun than Earth.

Radar observations show it’s shaped roughly like a potato, measuring 173 miles across and 144 miles long, but it only appears as a star-like dot in even the most powerful telescopes. Scientist know from spectral and other observations that its metal content is high.

“We’re quite confident that it is largely made of metal along with something else,” said Elkins-Tanton. “That’s something else might be rock, it might be sulfur based and it might be carbon based. We don’t know. And that is really the excitement of this.”

Starting in 2029, the Psyche spacecraft, built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory using a modified satellite body provided by Maxar, will attempt to answer those questions and many more during 26 months of close-range observations using a suite of sophisticated instruments.

“We’ve visited, either in person or robotically, worlds made of rock and worlds made of ice and worlds made of gas, but this will be our first time visiting a world that has a metal surface,” said Elkins-Tanton. “There aren’t that many completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system for us to go see. So that is what is so exciting about this.”

William Harwood

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of “Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia.”