“As a bonus, it captured images of Mars from a rare perspective,” NASA said in a press release.
The spacecraft approached Mars from a high phase angle, or side opposite the Sun, and Psyche showed the planet as a thin crescent as it moved for the encounter. The delicacy of the thin Martian atmosphere was on full display, sunlight glinting through diffuse dust clouds that hung dozens of miles off the sharp edge of the planet’s rust-colored surface.
This is the first view of nearly “full Mars” as seen by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the southern polar cap northward to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
This is the first view of nearly “full Mars” as seen by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft shortly after its closest approach to the planet on May 15, 2026. The view extends from the southern polar cap northward to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
As Psyche flew past the red planet, its cameras captured a wide-angle overhead view of Mars’ south pole ice cap. Jim Bell, who leads the Psyche imager instrument team at Arizona State University, said the spacecraft took thousands of images during the encounter. The observations will help scientists “calibrate and characterize” the cameras’ performance, Bell said.
Psyche’s magnetometer may have detected the signature of the solar wind interacting with Mars’ upper atmosphere or its residual magnetic field, and its spectrometers are tuned to measure the chemical composition of the Martian surface below the spacecraft’s flight path.
Numerous other missions are exploring Mars full-time, so there’s little chance of any big discoveries lurking in Psyche’s flying data sets. But scientists must be able to calibrate the mission’s instruments by comparing flight observations with archival data from other Mars missions.
It’s always interesting to gain new perspectives, even on something familiar. You can’t see crescent Mars from Earth. But the real result of the Psyche mission will come three years later, when the probe approaches the Massachusetts-sized asteroid Psyche, rich in iron, nickel and other metals. It’s truly uncharted territory, but the Psyche spacecraft will have more than two years to explore the asteroid, longer than the brief glimpse it got on Mars last week.
