NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Completes Mars Flyby With 1,000 mph Speed Boost en Route to Metal Asteroid

A spacecraft travelling at around 12,300 miles per hour just skimmed past Mars and came away going even faster. That’s the headline from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) after the Psyche probe completed a gravity-assist flyby of the Red Planet on 15 May 2026, passing just 2,864 miles above the Martian surface and picking up roughly 1,000 mph in the process.

The manoeuvre also shifted Psyche’s orbital plane by about one degree relative to the Sun — a small but deliberate adjustment that bends the spacecraft’s path towards its ultimate destination: asteroid 16 Psyche, a metal-rich body sitting in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Arrival is expected in late July 2029.

Free Speed, No Fuel Required

The principle behind a gravity assist is elegantly simple. By flying close to a massive body like Mars, a spacecraft can steal a fraction of the planet’s orbital momentum and convert it into velocity — no engine burn required. For a mission designed to travel hundreds of millions of miles, that’s a meaningful saving in onboard propellant.

Psyche’s engineers at JPL planned the flyby to do exactly this. The spacecraft passed Mars at roughly 12,300 to 12,330 mph relative to the planet, and the gravitational interaction added the equivalent of about 1,000 mph to its overall speed. That figure comes directly from JPL’s mission update posted after the flyby.

The Mars encounter also gave the science team something else: a chance to calibrate instruments before they’re needed in earnest. Images and data collected during the flyby are being used to fine-tune Psyche’s multispectral imager, magnetometer, and gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer — the tools that will eventually map 16 Psyche in detail.

What Psyche Is Actually Going to Look At

Asteroid 16 Psyche is about 173 miles across — roughly the distance from London to Bristol — and scientists believe it may be the exposed metallic core of an early protoplanet, stripped of its outer rocky layers by violent collisions billions of years ago. If that hypothesis holds, it would be the only known object of its kind that humanity has ever visited.

That’s a big if, of course. Some researchers are cautious, pointing out that 16 Psyche could turn out to be a more complex mixture of rock and metal rather than a pure iron-nickel core. But even in that scenario, the data would still be unprecedented. We’ve never had close-up measurements of a metal-rich asteroid at this scale.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Psyche mission’s principal investigator at Arizona State University, said: “We’re going to a body that we’ve never seen before, that we’ve never visited, that no human eyes have ever seen up close.”

The science case runs deeper than curiosity about one unusual rock. The interiors of rocky planets — Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus — are completely inaccessible to direct study. Planetary cores sit thousands of miles beneath the surface, shielded by enormous pressure and heat. Studying 16 Psyche could offer the closest thing to a window into what those cores actually look like.

Technology Being Tested Along the Way

Psyche isn’t just a science mission. It’s also a technology demonstration vehicle, and on two fronts that matter for future exploration.

The spacecraft uses solar electric propulsion — specifically Hall-effect thrusters — making it the first interplanetary mission to rely on this technology as its primary drive. Hall-effect thrusters work by ionising a propellant (in this case, xenon gas) and accelerating it with electric fields generated by the spacecraft’s large solar panels. The thrust is gentle but continuous, and far more efficient over long distances than conventional chemical rockets.

And then there’s the communications side. Psyche is carrying a laser optical communications system — the first demonstration of this technology beyond the Earth-Moon system. Traditional deep-space radio communications are reliable but slow. Laser-based systems could heavily increase data transmission rates for future missions, which matters a great deal as spacecraft carry increasingly sophisticated cameras and sensors.

The Road to 2029

Psyche launched from Cape Canaveral on 13 October 2023 as part of NASA’s Discovery Programme, which funds focused planetary science missions through a competitive selection process. JPL manages the mission; Arizona State University leads the science team.

After the Mars flyby, the spacecraft will spend the next three years on a deep-space cruise, continuing to use its Hall-effect thrusters to spiral outward through the solar system. Gravitational capture by asteroid 16 Psyche is expected in late July 2029, with the prime science mission beginning in August of that year. The plan calls for about 21 months of science operations in multiple mapping orbits at different altitudes, with the prime mission expected to wrap up around October or November 2031.

It’s a long game. But the Mars flyby on 15 May confirmed the spacecraft is on the right trajectory, and the data suggests the instruments are working as intended.

What This Means for Kent Residents

There’s no direct economic or practical impact on Kent from a deep-space science mission, but schools, colleges, and astronomy clubs across the county have a rich set of real-world material to work with — NASA makes Psyche’s images and data publicly available, and the mission’s milestones, including the 2029 asteroid arrival, offer natural hooks for STEM teaching and public science events. Kent residents with an interest in space can follow the mission through UK science outlets and the UK Space Agency’s educational resources, and the technologies being tested on Psyche — advanced propulsion and laser communications — are the kind of engineering that UK universities and space companies are increasingly involved in developing.