Hydrated minerals have paradoxically been found by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on the surface of 16 Psyche, a metallic asteroid that's the target of a NASA mission that launched in October 2023. Hydroxyl and possibly water were identified on Psyche, and the substances may originate from impacts — but if such hydration came from inside the asteroid instead, that would change everything. It would mean we were wrong about Psyche.
16 Psyche, sometimes simply called Psyche, is a dense, metallic asteroid that is 280 kilometers (173 miles) across at its widest point and moves in a 378 million to 497-million-kilometer (235-million- to 309-million- mile) orbit around the sun. This places Psyche in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, between 2.5 and 3.3 times further from the sun than Earth is.
