Astronomy - Watch Live Friday @ 9 pm EST: Slooh Webcast About Odd Metal Asteroid Psyche

The online Slooh Community Observatory will host a live webcast Friday (Jan. 6) about the huge metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, the target of a newly announced NASA space mission. The show begins at 9 p.m. EST (0200 on Jan. 7 GMT) and will be streamed live on Slooh.com. The broadcast will also appear in the window below, courtesy of Slooh:

From Slooh release:

On Friday, January 6th, at 6:00 PM PST | 9:00 PM EST | 02:00UTC (International Times: http://bit.ly/2j8OnVB), Slooh will host a special live show, peering into the asteroid belt to discover the ancient planetary core of 16 Psyche. The livestream will be anchored by live views of Psyche from Slooh’s telescopes at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.

During the broadcast, Slooh Host, Gerard Monteux, will be joined by one of the lead scientists on the Psyche project, Dr. David J. Lawrence of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Lawrence, along with a team led by Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, is hard at work on a mission to visit the metal asteroid and learn more about its origins. Dr. Lawrence will discuss what inspired the mission to this metal world, share what he hopes to learn from the trip, and give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the plans for the once in a lifetime mission.

Then, Slooh Astronomer, Eric Edelman, will be on hand to talk about why we study small bodies in the Asteroid Belt, what the Asteroid Belt even is, and why it’s important to understand objects like 16 Psyche and what sets this object apart from its asteroid neighbors.

16 Psyche is one of the ten most-massive asteroids in the asteroid belt at over 200 kilometers in diameter and contains a little less than 1 percent of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. It is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet and is the most massive metallic M-type asteroid. Said principal investigator Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the object, "16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a core."

On Wednesday, January 4th, NASA announced that Psyche, along with another asteroid mission named Lucy, would be the next missions out of its Discovery program. The Discovery program has previously funded missions like MESSENGER, which studied Mercury, and Dawn, which offered scientists the first close-up images of the dwarf planet Ceres.

Viewers can join the show by tweeting their questions to @Slooh, or joining in the live chat on Facebook.

You can go to Slooh.com to join and watch this live broadcast, snap and share your own photos during the event, chat with audience members and interact with the hosts, and personally control Slooh’s telescopes.