THE NEW SPACE RACE: Pedal to the Metal: NASA’s Psyche Heads Toward Asteroid Belt.

“It’s now ‘pedal to the metal’ to the asteroid Psyche,” said Don Han, the Psyche mission’s navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed for the agency by Caltech. “We will be running our propulsion system at every available opportunity, pausing only for necessary engineering activities. The thrusters will be operating nearly 90% of the time from now until we reach the asteroid.”

Where conventional spacecraft thrusters rely on large quantities of fuel to provide powerful bursts of thrust for relatively short periods of time, the Psyche spacecraft’s solar-powered propulsion system uses electromagnetic fields to steadily deliver up to 250 millinewtons of force — about the amount of force that you would feel from the weight of holding one AA battery.

Yes, but it adds up.

If the mission confirms Psyche’s potential, it could become the most valuable object in the solar system aside from Earth.