The Mars Photos NASA Released Are Pretty. The Actual Data Is More Interesting.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft flew past Mars on May 15, and every outlet published the same image: a polished, enhanced-color composite released by JPL's image processing team. What they did not publish is the raw data.
The actual instrument measurements — wavelength-resolved multispectral data captured by Psyche's imaging spectrometer — are already sitting in NASA PDS, the public archive where mission data lives before it gets processed into press-release imagery. You can download it now. Run your own spectral analysis. See what JPL's image processors chose not to highlight.
Jim Bell, the imager lead on Psyche, said the team is developing image processing tools for use at the asteroid. What that means in practice: the raw Level 1 calibrated data — the unprocessed, instrument-calibrated measurements — is what planetary scientists actually work from, and it is already in the archive.
The flyby was a trajectory assist. Mars's gravity gave Psyche a 1,000 mile-per-hour boost and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the Sun, putting it on course for arrival at the metal-rich asteroid Psyche in summer 2029. At closest approach the spacecraft came within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of Mars's surface, close enough for the imager to resolve features at around 2,200 feet (670 meters) per pixel.
The asteroid Psyche sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe it may be the exposed metallic core of an ancient planetesimal — a building block of planets — making it one of the most directly observable metallic worlds in the solar system.
The raw multispectral data from the flyby is what gives that metallic-core hypothesis its empirical weight. A spectrometer does not lie about what wavelengths a surface reflects. The released composites are beautiful. The numbers underneath them are what the science is actually made of.
The data is at NASA PDS. The door is open.