NASA has launched a mission to a rare asteroid covered in metal that is two billion miles (3.6bn km) and six years’ travel time away from Earth.
Scientists hope exploring the Psyche asteroid will help them understand more about how Earth formed and what makes it habitable.
Lead scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, of Arizona State University, said: “It’s long been humans’ dream to go to the metal core of our Earth. I mean, ask [author] Jules Verne.
“The pressure is too high. The temperature is too high. The technology is impossible. But there’s one way in our solar system that we can look at a metal core and that is by going to this asteroid.”
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Most asteroids tend to be rocky or icy, and this is the first look at a metal one – the team is also hoping to take the first-ever images of it.
Potato-shaped rock is 150 miles wide
Psyche, which may be the battered remains of a planetesimal, or a building block of a rocky planet, is the largest of the nine metal-rich asteroids discovered so far, NASA said.
The potato-shaped rock measures about 144 miles by 173 miles (232km by 280 km) at its widest and has a mass of about 440 billion pounds.
It will dwarf the van-sized spacecraft, with solar panels big enough to fill a tennis court.
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Also called Psyche, the spacecraft was launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, in Florida, on Friday.
The agency believes the asteroid, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter, is brimming with iron, nickel and other metals – and quite possibly silicates. It is a dull grey colour, probably because its surface is covered with fine metal grains from cosmic impacts.
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It was discovered in 1852 and named after Greek mythology’s captivating goddess of the soul.
As to what they will find, scientists imagine spiky craters, huge metal cliffs and metal-encrusted eroded lava flows that are greenish-yellow from sulfur. However, Ms Elkins-Tanton admitted that is “almost certain to be completely wrong”.
Tiny amounts of gold, silver, platinum or iridium – iron-loving elements – could be dissolved in the asteroid’s iron and nickel, she said.
“There’s a very good chance that it’s going to be outside of our imaginings, and that is my fondest hope.”
Believed to be a planetary building block from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, the asteroid can help answer fundamental questions such as how life began on Earth and what makes our planet habitable, according to Ms Elkins-Tanton.
Led by Arizona State University on NASA’s behalf, the $1.2 billion (£985m) mission will swoop past Mars for a gravity boost in 2026.
Three years later, it will reach the asteroid and attempt to go into orbit around it, circling it at a distance of between 47 and 440 miles (75 and 700 km) until at least 2031.
A well-known Iraqi social media influencer has reportedly been shot dead in her car by a gunman on a motorbike.
Om Fahad, whose real name is Ghufran Sawadi, was killed outside her home in Baghdad’s Zayouna district on Friday, according to the AFP news agency, citing security officials.
It appears the unidentified attacker pretended to be delivering food to the victim, one security source said.
Om Fahad, who has nearly half a million TikTok followers, became famous for posting light-hearted videos where she dances to Iraqi music.
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Six days ago, she shared footage of herself driving in a car and also posing in front of a mirror. They have each been watched hundreds of thousands of times.
The influencer was sentenced to six months in prison in February last year for sharing videos that a court ruled contained “indecent speech that undermines modesty and public morality”.
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A campaign was launched in 2023 by the Iraqi government to clamp down on social media content which broke the country’s “morals and traditions”.
The interior ministry set up a committee to look for “offensive” clips on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, with several influencers being arrested.
“This type of content is no less dangerous than organised crime,” the ministry declared in a promotional video which asked the public to help by reporting such content.
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“It is one of the causes of the destruction of the Iraqi family and society.”
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In 2018, gunmen in Baghdad shot dead Tara Fares, who was a model and influencer.
After years of war and sectarian conflict following the 2003 US invasion that overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq has returned to some semblance of normality despite sporadic violence, political instability and corruption.
But civil liberties, particularly among women and sexual minorities, are still constrained in a conservative and male-dominated society.
The family of a missing high school student who may have been the first victim of a suspected serial killer in Mexico City have protested at the site where bones were found last week.
The bones were discovered with the belongings of at least six women, police said, and Amairany Roblero’s relatives have been told that evidence was found relating to her 2012 disappearance.
Ms Roblero was 18 when she vanished and, as is often the case in Mexico, her family was left to investigate her disappearance with little help from prosecutors.
Family friend Alejandra Jimenez said: “The prosecutors had the case file but they didn’t ever give any results to her parents.”
Instead, her parents printed flyers and gave them out near her school – the last place she was seen – but they had “nothing, nowhere to start, nor any directions to the end”, Ms Jimenez added.
A suspect, identified only by his first name, Miguel, was detained by neighbours and police last week after he is alleged to have killed a seventh young woman.
He is accused of waiting for a woman to leave her apartment and then rushing inside to sexually abuse and strangle her 17-year-old daughter.
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The woman returned to the apartment to see the suspect leaving and she was slashed across her neck before he ran off.
She survived but her daughter died.
Investigators searched a room rented by the suspect and found bones, mobile phones and ID cards belonging to several women in the same block, thought to be mementos.
Miguel is awaiting trial on charges of murder and attempted murder relating to the most recent victims.
City prosecutor Ulises Lara insisted the suspect was difficult to catch because “he showed no signs of violent or aggressive behaviour in his daily life”.
Ms Roblero’s family and friends were not accepting this, however.
“They (authorities) have all the means to look for missing people,” Ms Jimenez said. “Instead of focusing on their political campaigns, they should help all the women who are looking for their children.”
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Juan Carlos Gutierrez, a lawyer representing the family of another victim, was also frustrated, asking why no investigation had never been launched in that case, despite missing person reports being filed in 2015.
Ms Jimenez said Ms Roblero’s family had not been told which of the items or remains in the apartment had been linked to her, adding: “This is wearing her parents down physically, mentally.”
Some 2,580 women were murdered in Mexico in 2023, according to the country’s National Public Security System but poorly funded and badly trained prosecutors have failed to stop serial killers over the years.
In 2021 a serial killer in Mexico City killed 19 people but their bodies were only found, buried at his house, after the wife of a police commander became one of the victims.
In 2018 another serial killer in Mexico City murdered at least 10 women and was only stopped after he was seen pushing a dismembered body down the street in a pram.