16 Psyche
main-belt asteroid
16 Psyche ( SY-kee) is a large M-type asteroid, which was discovered by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, on 17 March 1852 and named after the Greek goddess Psyche.
The prefix "16" signifies that it was the sixteenth minor planet in order of discovery.
It is the largest and most massive of the M-type asteroids, and one of the dozen most massive asteroids. This body has a mean diameter of approximately 222 kilometers (138 mi) and contains about one percent of the cumulative mass of the whole asteroid belt. It was thought to be the exposed core of a protoplanet, but observations reported in 2020 have cast doubt on that hypothesis.
Psyche will be explored by NASA, with a spacecraft of the same name, marking the first time a human-made object will journey to a metallic asteroid. The spacecraft was launched on 13 October 2023, with an expected arrival in 2029.
Symbol
19th-century astronomers created iconic symbols for the first asteroids to be discovered, following the tradition of the classical planets. Psyche's symbol was a butterfly's wing topped by a star ( or ), as the butterfly was the Greek symbol of the soul (psyche being the Greek word for both "butterfly" and "soul"). This symbol may have influenced the design of the official insignia for the NASA Psyche mission to this asteroid.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107517. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1852, 2020, 2023 and 2029.
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This entry incorporates text from “16 Psyche” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.