Featured Image Credit: CHANDAN KHANNA / Contributor / 24K-Production / Getty
The world should have its eyes set on NASA's mission to capture an asteroid, as if successful it could net every single person over $1 billion.
Money definitely makes the world go round, and while cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are perhaps the best way to get rich quick right now, one discovery by NASA could end up saving us all the trouble.
While asteroids are fascinating in their own right, telling us much about space and even the origins of Earth, they can sometimes hold materials that are extremely valuable back on home soil.
That is very much the case for 16 Psyche, as the 173-mile wide asteroid is estimated to be worth $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 - that's 10 quintillion.
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If captured by NASA and brought back to Earth, the materials found on 16 Psyche could give every single human being $1,246,105,919 which could easily transform humanity as we know it.
First discovered 172 years ago by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, the '16' in its name refers to the fact that it was the 16th asteroid discovered by humans.
What makes it special compared to most is that it's estimated that 30 to 60% of it's form is comprised of valuable metals like gold, iron, and nickel, which could be sold for a rather significant sum of money if brought back to Earth.
Scientists claim that the asteroid stretches 173 miles at its widest point, and features 64,000 square miles of total surface area - so as you can imagine, that's quite a lot of metal.
NASA have embarked upon a mission to analyze the asteroid, sending a 'Psyche spacecraft' alongside a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket into space.
The spacecraft then has to travel around 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers) to its destination, and the space agency have planned for it to reach its destination by July 2029.
In the process of getting to 16 Psyche the spacecraft will find itself within the gravitation pull of Mars, which is scheduled for around May 2026, at which point it will use the pull to dramatically increase its velocity and eventually reach the asteroid.
While the money will definitely be the interest of most people, the main purpose of NASA's mission is to simply study the asteroid, as it's presume to be the core of a planetesimal.
This could give scientists a significant breakthrough regarding the formation of Earth and other similar rocky or terrestrial planets, and that - to them - could perhaps be worth more than a trillion dollars.
We'll keep our hopes up for the cash though, as I'm sure you will too.
