NASA’S Psyche mission is on its way to the asteroid Psyche (yes, I know, I wish they had named it something else to avoid this confusion), a large asteroid that is apparently made of mostly metal. It’s the largest such asteroid in the main belt, and an object of considerable interest. It was likely once the core of a larger asteroid that got busted apart by impacts, so investigating it is like sending a probe deep into the interior of a planet.

The mission has made one big loop of its trajectory so far, going out into the asteroid belt and then falling back in toward the sun. On May 15^th 2026 it will swing by Mars for a gravity assist (colloquially called a gravitational slingshot): it will steal some of Mars’s orbital energy to accelerate, speeding up its journey out into the main asteroid and giving it the boost it needs to meet up with Psyche (asteroid). Maneuvers like this save fuel, so they can be a vital part of a mission.

Psyche will pass just 4,500 km from the planet’s surface, which is less than the diameter of Mars! So it’s a decently close pass, and it’ll zip past at nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour. It’s been taking observations as it approaches, and thousands are planned both to test its detectors and get more info on Mars, which is always nice. I particularly like this one:

Psyche took this on May 7, 2026 from a distance of roughly 3 million km, and, since the spacecraft is heading back toward the sun from the asteroid belt, it sees Mars as a thin crescent, a view we can never get from Earth. The little extra pieces of the crescent “horns” (technical term: ansae) are sunlight scattered by the planet’s atmosphere (possibly aided by dust and high-altitude clouds). 

Mars is only about 7 arcminutes wide here — the full moon from Earth is more than four times wider, and the camera used has a resolution of about 0.2 arcminutes, so Mars looks pixelated (I also enlarged it a bit so you can see it better). It will get bigger and smoother as Psyche approaches. 

You can watch the raw images roll in at the NASA Psyche website; hopefully I’ll have some fun ones to show you next week. Stay tuned!

I saw some news recently that made me both happy and angry simultaneously, and nothing does that better than news about power generation. An article on EENews reports that California has just started producing energy from a huge wind-power program. It consists of a staggering 916 turbines, which together can generate 3.5 gigawatts of power! An average US home uses about 1 kilowatt of power, so this farm alone could run over 3 million homes. It’s a huge step forward!

That makes me very happy.

However, the company that’s behind it, SunZia Wind, has not been crowing about it. Why not? According to the article, it’s so they don’t catch the attention and ire of the current regime, which could wind up somehow punishing them for this.

That’s not an irrational fear. Because — speaking of irrational — Trump has a bizarre and wholly untethered opinion about wind power, thinking among other things it can cause cancer (it does not). Trump’s also known for being viciously vindictive, making life very difficult for any perceived slights against him. The company’s attitude is prudent.

And that is why I’m also angry. We’ve been immersed in this miasma of right-wing baloney for so long it’s easy to take it for granted, but here we have a prime example of the direct harm it’s causing.

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