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“As a bonus, it captured images of Mars in an unusual way,” NASA said in a press release.
The spacecraft approached Mars from a higher altitude, or from the opposite side of the Sun, which made the planet appear like a small sphere when Psyche moved to meet it. The brilliance of the thin Martian atmosphere was clear, the sunlight shining through the dust clouds that stretched for miles along the edge of the rusty planet.
This is the first close-up view of Mars as seen by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft after its closest approach to Earth on May 15, 2026. The view stretches from south to north to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
This is the first close-up view of Mars as seen by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft after its closest approach to Earth on May 15, 2026. The view stretches from south to north to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
As Psyche flew past the red planet, its cameras captured a large image of Mars’ southern polar ice cap. Jim Bell, who leads the Psyche instrument team at Arizona State University, said the spacecraft took thousands of images during the encounter. The observations will help scientists “improve and demonstrate” how the cameras work, Bell said.
Psyche’s magnetometer may have detected the signature of the solar wind interacting with the Martian atmosphere or its residual magnetic field, and its spectrometers were designed to measure Martian chemical concentrations under the spacecraft’s flight path.
Many other missions are constantly exploring Mars, so there is no chance of finding the big objects found in the Psyche flyby dataset. But scientists still need to balance the mission’s instruments by comparing flyby observations with data from other Mars missions.
It’s always fun to get new ideas, even on familiar things. You can’t see even a fraction of Mars from Earth. But the real payoff of Psyche’s work will come in three years, when the probe will approach asteroid Psyche, a Massachusetts-sized object rich in iron, nickel, and other metals that we know as a faint blob through a telescope. It’s an unspecified part, but the Psyche spacecraft will have more than two years to scan the sky, much longer than the image it got from Mars last week.
