On its way to a metal-rich asteroid, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft swung past Mars on May 15, 2026, using the planet’s gravity to bend its trajectory toward the outer solar system. The maneuver did double duty: it also gave the mission’s science team a rare, close-range test of its instruments, producing a monthlong time-lapse sequence of Mars during approach, closest approach, and departure, along with calibration data the team is now cross-checking against decades of existing Mars observations.
Psyche launched in October 2023 and is headed for the asteroid 16 Psyche, a metallic body in the main asteroid belt believed to be either the exposed core of an early planetesimal or an unusually metal-rich remnant of planet formation. The spacecraft is expected to arrive in the summer of 2029. The Mars flyby was a scheduled gravity-assist maneuver, not a science-primary event, but NASA and the mission team built a calibration campaign around it anyway, using the close pass as a proving ground for the instruments that will characterize the asteroid on arrival.
What the time-lapse shows
The released footage was captured by Psyche’s multispectral imager and stitches together frames from across the flyby to show Mars growing larger, then smaller, in the field of view as the spacecraft approached, passed close by, and departed. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission, the imager is led by Jim Bell of Arizona State University. The same instrument will later map the surface of Psyche in multiple wavelengths once the spacecraft arrives at the asteroid.
A calibration opportunity, not just a photo op
Two other instruments used the flyby the same way. Psyche’s magnetometer, led by Ben Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recorded Mars’s induced and crustal magnetic fields, giving the team a real signal to check the instrument against ahead of its central task at the asteroid: searching for evidence of a fossil magnetic field that would support the hypothesis that Psyche is a stripped planetary core. The mission’s gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, led by David Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, likewise collected data during the pass, exercising the instrument that will eventually be used to estimate the asteroid’s surface composition.
NASA’s Psyche mission is led by Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of California, Berkeley, with JPL managing the mission on behalf of NASA and Arizona State University hosting the mission’s science operations.
A genuinely multi-agency dataset
Because Mars already carries one of the most heavily instrumented observation records of any planet besides Earth, the flyby also became a cross-referencing exercise rather than a standalone measurement. According to JPL, the Psyche team compared its flyby data against existing Mars datasets from NASA’s own Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 2001 Mars Odyssey, and the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, as well as against data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Orbiter. That combination — a US deep-space mission validating its instruments against an active, multi-decade international Mars fleet spanning NASA, ESA, and the UAE Space Agency — is a practical illustration of how shared planetary-science infrastructure lets a single flyby function as a cross-agency calibration exercise rather than an isolated data point.
Why this matters ahead of 2029
Psyche’s core science questions — whether 16 Psyche is a planetary core, an unusually metallic asteroid, or something else entirely — can only be answered once the spacecraft reaches the asteroid and its instruments observe a target with no prior close-range dataset to compare against. The Mars flyby is the closest the mission will come to a full instrument dress rehearsal before then, and the resulting time-lapse offers a public, visual record of that test in action as the spacecraft continues on toward its 2029 arrival.
Source: NASA/JPL, “NASA’s Psyche Mission Delivers Mars Flyby Data, Time-Lapse Video”, published July 17, 2026.
