[MUST WATCH] NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Turned a Mars Flyby Into a Stunning Tour of the Red Planet

The asteroid-bound probe tested its instruments while stealing momentum from Mars.

At first, Mars was little more than a curved blade of light suspended in darkness.

As NASA’s Psyche spacecraft drew nearer, the crescent thickened. Sunlight filtered through the planet’s dusty atmosphere, outlining its edge. Then the Red Planet’s surface itself swung into view: rust-colored plains, dark volcanic terrain and craters with streaks of windblown dust trailing behind them.

Finally, after the spacecraft raced past Mars on May 15, the planet appeared nearly full. Its bright southern ice cap stretched across the bottom of the frame, while the vast Valles Marineris canyon system cut across the landscape farther north.

NASA has now assembled the images into a time-lapse of Psyche’s encounter with Mars. The sequence creates the illusion of skimming over the planet, although the spacecraft never came closer than 4,609 kilometers, or 2,864 miles, from its surface.

A Stunning Flyby

Mars has been photographed countless times by orbiters, landers and rovers, but Psyche approached from a different angle. It began with the planet almost entirely in shadow. Over roughly a month, its cameras watched Mars transform from a distant crescent into a globe crowded with geological detail.

The probe is on its way to visit and study the asteroid Psyche, which is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It used the red planet as a gravitational slingshot to save precious fuel for its long journey. But scientists couldn’t resist the opportunity to do something cool with their time spent in Mars’ orbit. Check out the stunning timelapse in the video below.

A Landscape of Ice, Wind and Ancient Impacts

Near closest approach, Psyche photographed Huygens, a roughly 470-kilometer-wide impact basin marked by two concentric rings. Whatever hit Mars millions of years ago, the impact must have been immense; powerful enough to fracture and reshape a vast area of the Martian crust.

Elsewhere, the cameras picked out impact craters crossed by dark, tapering streaks. These markings form as Martian winds sweep loose dust around raised crater rims, leaving elongated patterns that reveal how the very thin air moves across the otherwise barren landscape. Psyche also captured its sharpest view of Mars’s water-ice-rich southern polar cap shortly after passing the planet.

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“The imager performed brilliantly, delivering some rarely seen views of the Red Planet,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University.

The spacecraft’s twin cameras also detected Mars’s small moons, Phobos and Deimos, from far away. Scientists will compare the new images with observations from NASA and European orbiters, as well as the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, to check the cameras’ color calibration and sensitivity to scattered light.

But Mars was never Psyche’s destination. The spacecraft simply used the planet as a power booster.

Mars’s gravity pulled on the probe as it passed, increasing its speed and slightly tilting its path around the sun. This maneuver allowed Psyche to change course without consuming the large amount of propellant that would otherwise have been required. Such gravity assists have become a mainstay of deep-space exploration, allowing spacecraft to borrow momentum from planets as they cross the solar system.

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A Rehearsal for a Stranger World

The flyby also served as a full-scale rehearsal for Psyche’s main mission: exploring an asteroid of the same name in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

During the encounter, the spacecraft tested instruments built to study the asteroid’s surface, composition and magnetic history. Its neutron spectrometer registered an expected increase in particles escaping from Mars, demonstrating that it could detect the signals scientists will use to identify elements on the asteroid.

Its magnetometer, meanwhile, recorded the first magnetic signature from a planetary body during the mission. The instrument detected a sharp increase as Psyche crossed Mars’s bow shock, the turbulent region where particles flowing from the sun meet the planet’s magnetic environment.

“This flyby calibration effort validated the instrument’s performance under dynamic conditions while also revealing the fascinating physics of planetary magnetism,” said Ben Weiss, the mission’s deputy principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists hope the same instrument will help resolve what asteroid Psyche actually is. Researchers once regarded the object as the exposed iron core of a small planet whose rocky exterior was stripped away by collisions. But studies of its density and surface suggest a more complicated body containing both metal and silicate rock — or perhaps a highly porous heap of metallic debris.

The spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in the summer of 2029.