NASA’s Psyche probe has returned a rare portrait of Earth and the Moon taken from roughly 180 million miles (290 million kilometers) away as the spacecraft calibrates its twin cameras en route to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The long-exposure image, captured in July and released this week by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the two bodies as bright specks against a star field in the constellation Aries. Engineers used the test to verify that the imager can detect dim, sunlight-reflecting targets—an ability that will be essential for mapping the asteroid once the spacecraft arrives. All systems are reported to be healthy after an earlier xenon-valve issue was resolved by switching to a backup fuel line, allowing the craft’s solar-electric thrusters to resume normal operations. Launched on 13 October 2023, Psyche is traveling a 2.2-billion-mile spiral through the inner solar system and will fly past Mars in May 2026 for a gravity assist. It is scheduled to enter orbit around its namesake asteroid—an object about 280 kilometers across that may be the exposed core of a primordial protoplanet—in July 2029. Scientists hope the mission will offer the first direct look at metallic planetary building blocks and deepen understanding of how rocky worlds such as Earth formed.