NASA's Psyche Spacecraft Captures Breathtaking Mars Flyby
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has captured a rather mesmerizing time-lapse video of Mars during its recent high-speed gravity assist flyby, offering a different view of the Red Planet’s craters, vast rust-red deserts, and polar ice caps as the probe slingshots toward its main objective: the metal-rich 16 Psyche asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
Gathered between May 2 and May 15, the imagery shows Psyche’s close meeting with Mars. Approaching from a sharp angle relative to the Sun, the spacecraft watched Mars transform from an illuminated crescent into a swelling, detailed globe (see video above). The high-phase angle lighting also created dramatic contrasts across the Martian surface, throwing deep shadows into sprawling impact craters while illuminating the reflective carbon dioxide ice sheets guarding the planet’s poles.
While the primary objective of the flyby was for gravitational assistance (i.e. using Mars’ orbital momentum to bend Psyche’s path and slingshot it towards the...
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