NASA is sending a spaceship to an asteroid that is worth 70,000 times more than the entire global economy.
The US space agency will launch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Space Centre in Florida to the expensive bit of space real estate in October this year.
It will take three-and-a-half years to get to the Psyche asteroid - the name of the rich rock, which the programme is named after.
Psyche is made up of mostly iron and nickel, unlike other asteroids which tend to be mostly rock and ice.
However, it is one of the largest asteroids in the solar system and, with an average diameter of 220km, it makes up one per cent of our galaxy’s asteroid belt.
Given its size and makeup, it is worth an estimated $10quintillion (£8quintillion).
That’s $10,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The asteroid was discovered back in the 19th century when it was spotted by Italian scientist Annibale de Gasparis in 1852, who named it after the Greek goddess of the soul who was born mortal and married Eros, the god of Love.
It is a titan in the asteroid belt which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter where between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids are larger than 1km - with millions more smaller.
When NASA’s space mission makes it to the asteroid, it will spend 21 months observing it, hopefully allowing the space agency to understand more about its history and structure.
Psyche is of interest not because of its mind-boggling wealth, but because its unique makeup indicates it could be the leftover core of a protoplanet that tried, and failed, to form billions of years ago.
If it is, it would offer a brilliant insight into how planets like Earth form.
The programme will also be a good test of new deep space communications technology, but the launch was delayed for a year for what NASA called “critical testing”.
The new communications system will encode data in photons in a laser at much higher wavelengths than previously and fire them back across the galaxy to Earth.
The contract for the launch, which was won by Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2020, is valued at $117 million (£94m) dollars.
