If all goes well, on Thursday morning a NASA mission with extensive connections to MIT will be headed to a metal world. Psyche, a van-sized spacecraft with winglike solar panels, is scheduled to blast off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket tomorrow at 10:16 a.m. Eastern Time. Psyche’s destination is a potato-shaped asteroid by the same name that orbits the sun within the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers suspect that the asteroid Psyche, which is about the size of Massachusetts, is made mostly of metal. If that’s…
