Hubble telescope gives closer look at rare asteroid worth 70,000 times the global economy

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been used to study a rare metallic asteroid, named Psyche 16, during two points of its rotation. The investigation has given interesting results.

The new study, which was published this week in The Planetary Science Journal, indicates that asteroid’s composition is key to its astronomical value.

The value when written out in full comes out to be $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. This makes Psyche 70,000 times more valuable than the global economy, worth about $142 trillion in 2019.

Also, the said asteroid could have been a protoplanet. Researchers said, "The Earth has a metallic core, a mantle and a crust. It is possible that during the formation of a protoplanet Psyche, it was struck by another object in our solar system and lost its mantle and crust."

The asteroid is the largest piece of space debris in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is currently about 230 million miles from Earth in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt.

NASA plans to send a spacecraft into orbit around the asteroid. The mission, named Psyche, will launch in 2022, with the spacecraft reaching the asteroid in 2026.