NASA’s Psyche spacecraft returns unfamiliar views of a familiar world
“As a bonus, it captured images of Mars from a rare angle,” NASA said in a press release.
The spacecraft approached Mars at a high phase angle or from the side opposite the Sun, making the planet appear as a thin crescent as Psyche headed toward the encounter. The thin Martian atmosphere was in full view, sunlight shining through diffuse clouds of dust hanging dozens of kilometers above the sharp edge of the planet’s rust-colored surface.
This is the first view of a nearly “full” Mars seen by NASA’s Psyche space probe shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the southern polar cap northward to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
This is the first view of a nearly “full” Mars seen by NASA’s Psyche space probe shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the southern polar cap northward to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
As Psyche flew past the Red Planet, its cameras captured a wide-angle aerial view of Mars’ south polar ice cap. Jim Bell, who leads the Psyche Imaging Instrument Team at Arizona State University, said the spacecraft took thousands of images during the encounter. The observations will help scientists “calibrate and characterize” the performance of the cameras, Bell said.
Psyche’s magnetometer may have detected a signature of the solar wind interacting with Mars’ upper atmosphere or its remnant magnetic field, and its spectrometers were tuned to measure the chemical composition of the Martian surface below the spacecraft’s flight path.
Many other missions explore Mars full-time, so there is little chance that major discoveries are hiding in Psyche’s flyby datasets. But scientists should be able to calibrate the mission’s instruments by comparing flyby observations with archival data from other Mars missions.
It’s always interesting to gain new perspectives, even on something familiar. You can’t see a crescent of Mars from Earth. But the real result of the Psyche mission will come in three years, when the probe approaches the asteroid Psyche, an object the size of Massachusetts rich in iron, nickel and probably other metals that we know only as a fuzzy blob through telescopes. This is truly uncharted territory, but the Psyche space probe will have more than two years to study the asteroid, much longer than the fleeting glimpse it had of Mars last week.
