On Friday, May 15, 2026, a NASA spacecraft the size of a tennis court will hurtle past Mars at roughly 12,000 mph, skimming about 2,800 miles above the planet’s rust-colored surface. The probe won’t slow down, won’t enter orbit, and won’t land. Instead, it will let Mars do something no engine can do as efficiently: grab hold of it with gravity and fling it onto a new course toward one of the strangest objects in the solar system.
The spacecraft is Psyche, and its target is asteroid 16 Psyche, a potato-shaped body roughly 173 miles across orbiting in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe the asteroid may be the exposed iron-nickel core of a protoplanet that was stripped of its rocky outer layers by violent collisions billions of years ago. If that hypothesis holds, Psyche would offer humanity its first direct look at material resembling Earth’s own deep core, a region buried thousands of miles beneath our feet that no drill will ever reach.
What happens during the flyby
According to a mission update from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Psyche will reach its closest approach to Mars on Friday at an altitude of approximately 2,800 miles (4,500 km), traveling at about 12,333 mph (19,848 kph) relative to the planet. The encounter is the single most consequential navigation event since the spacecraft launched on October 13, 2023, and it will unfold with the probe’s thrusters deliberately switched off.
That silence is intentional. A peer-reviewed paper in Space Science Reviews detailing the mission’s trajectory design explains that the flight dynamics team shuts down the solar electric propulsion system well before the flyby so Psyche coasts on a purely gravitational path. With no thrust “noise” muddying the signal, engineers can track the spacecraft’s position through radio measurements with far greater precision, tightening the aim point for the gravity assist. The JPL press kit confirms this logic and notes that the coasting strategy reduces the need for last-minute correction burns.
As Psyche swings behind Mars, the planet’s gravity will bend the spacecraft’s trajectory and boost its velocity, redirecting it onto a new sun-centered orbit that intersects 16 Psyche’s path in the outer main belt. The energy gain from this single pass would take the probe’s low-thrust ion engines months of continuous firing to replicate on their own. After the flyby, Psyche will resume powered cruising toward an expected arrival at the asteroid in August 2029, according to NASA’s mission timeline.
What the cameras will see
During the close approach, Psyche’s multispectral cameras are expected to capture images of the Martian surface and atmosphere. NASA has confirmed that raw images will be published through its raw-image portal, giving the public access to what the spacecraft sees as it races past the Red Planet. The agency has not specified resolution targets, exposure strategies, or how quickly the data will appear after closest approach.
JPL frames the imaging primarily as an opportunity to test cameras and data pipelines under real flight conditions rather than as a dedicated Mars science campaign. Whether any of the resulting images will be folded into formal research on Martian geology or atmosphere remains an open question; no detailed statements from the science team at Arizona State University, which leads the mission’s scientific investigation under principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton, have been published on the topic as of mid-May 2026.
How the spacecraft got here
Psyche lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on October 13, 2023, and has spent the intervening months gradually reshaping its orbit using solar electric propulsion. The system works by accelerating ionized xenon gas through electric fields powered by the spacecraft’s oversized solar arrays, each one stretching about 37 feet long. The thrust is gentle, roughly equivalent to the force you’d feel holding a AA battery in your palm, but it is relentless, and over time it adds up to significant velocity changes.
Navigators at JPL have been refining the trajectory since launch, executing small correction maneuvers to steer Psyche toward a tightly defined aim point near Mars. The flyby altitude and speed have been tuned to maximize the energy gain while keeping the spacecraft safely above the Martian atmosphere. JPL’s press kit describes an expected flyby altitude range of roughly 1,900 to 2,700 miles (3,000 to 4,400 km), reflecting the broader targeting envelope from earlier in the planning cycle; the more recent news release narrows the estimate to approximately 2,800 miles, suggesting the final trajectory solution places the spacecraft near the upper end of that window.
The mission also carries a groundbreaking technology demonstration: the Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, or DSOC, which has already set records for the farthest-ever laser communication link. While DSOC is not directly involved in the Mars flyby, its success during the cruise phase has validated a technology that could transform how future deep-space missions send data back to Earth.
Why a metal asteroid matters
Earth’s core is a ball of iron and nickel roughly 1,500 miles in radius, generating the magnetic field that shields the planet from solar radiation. But no spacecraft, no drill, and no seismic wave has ever delivered a direct sample of that material. Everything scientists know about planetary cores comes from indirect evidence: the way seismic waves bend, the density of the planet, the behavior of its magnetic field.
Asteroid 16 Psyche could change that. If the body truly is a stripped protoplanetary core, orbiting it and mapping its composition would give researchers a natural laboratory for studying the building blocks that lurk at the centers of rocky worlds. The data could sharpen models of how Earth and the other terrestrial planets formed, differentiated into layers, and evolved over 4.5 billion years.
That scientific payoff is still more than three years away. But Friday’s flyby is the gate the mission must pass through to get there. Until Psyche emerges from behind Mars and begins downlinking telemetry, some details will remain uncertain. No trajectory correction announcements, anomaly disclosures, or schedule changes have appeared in the public record as of mid-May 2026, which in deep-space operations typically signals that a spacecraft is performing as planned.
What comes next after Mars
Once the gravity assist is complete and confirmed, Psyche will reignite its ion engines and begin the long outbound cruise through the asteroid belt. The spacecraft is expected to reach 16 Psyche in August 2029, where it will spend at least 26 months in orbit, progressively lowering its altitude to map the asteroid’s surface composition, gravity field, and remnant magnetism in fine detail.
For now, the mission team at JPL is watching the clock tick toward Friday. The command sequences for the flyby have already been loaded and tested aboard the spacecraft, according to remarks from JPL operations lead Sarah Bairstow distributed through ScienceDaily. The thrusters are off. The cameras are ready. And Mars, indifferent as ever, is waiting.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
