“As an added bonus, it captured images of Mars from an unusual perspective,” NASA said in a news release.
The spacecraft approached Mars from a high phase angle, or from the side opposite the Sun, making the planet appear like a thin crescent as Psyche approached for the encounter. The tenuous Martian atmosphere was in view, with sunlight shining through diffuse clouds of dust suspended tens of kilometers above the sharp edge of the planet’s rust-colored surface.
This is the first view of a nearly “full” Mars 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 north to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
This is the first view of a nearly “full” Mars 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 north to the Valles Marineris canyon system and beyond.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
As Psyche passed near the red planet, its cameras captured a wide-angle aerial view of Mars’ south polar 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 a signature of the solar wind interacting with Mars’ upper atmosphere or its remaining magnetic field, and its spectrometers were tuned to measure the chemical composition of the Martian surface beneath the spacecraft’s flight path.
Many other missions explore Mars full-time, so there’s little chance of any major discoveries hiding in the Psyche flyby data sets. But scientists should be able to calibrate the mission’s instruments by comparing the flyby observations with archival data from other Mars missions.
It’s always interesting to get new perspectives, even on something familiar. You can’t see a Mars crescent from Earth. But the Psyche mission’s real reward will come three years from now, when the probe approaches asteroid Psyche, a Massachusetts-sized object rich in iron, nickel and probably other metals that we only know as a blur through telescopes. It’s truly uncharted territory, but the Psyche spacecraft will have more than two years to study the asteroid, much longer than the fleeting glimpse it had of Mars last week.
