NASA spacecraft to fly past Mars on voyage to rare metal asteroid

A NASA spacecraft headed toward the asteroid belt will fly past Mars on Friday, aiming to get a boost from the planet's gravitational field and save some of the propellant it needs to complete the second half of a six-year voyage. The spacecraft, called Psyche after the rare asteroid it will explore, launched in October 2023. At the time, it set out on a 2.2-billion-mile journey to the metal-rich celestial rock, which scientists believe may hold clues about how the cores of planets like Earth initially formed. Psyche will travel quite close to Mars, coming within just 2,800 miles of the red planet's surface at its nearest point, according to NASA . Slingshotting past at about 12,333 miles per hour, the spacecraft "will harness the planet's gravitational pull to speed up and adjust its trajectory" toward the asteroid, the agency said. The asteroid that scientists have described as a "metal world" and "one of the more unusual objects in our solar system" sits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's explorer is expected to approach and begin orbiting the ultimate target of its mission at the end of 2029. But the spacecraft will take advantage of the opportunity to observe Mars in the meantime. The team operating it has already released an image of the planet from about 3 million miles away. This image of Mars was captured by NASA's Psyche mission on May 3, 2026, about 3 million miles from the planet. …