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A SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches the Psyche mission. The orbiter mission will explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. 16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid. The mass of the payload is 2,600 kg. Instantaneous Launch Window: October 13th at 10:19AM EDT (14:19 UTC)

I've spent the last few months putting together a book on my grandfather, Jack Bell, a prospector who won and lost fortunes from Alaska down to Mexico - naturalist, angler, newspaper and magazine writer, law enforcement. Book's too big. So while I'm figuring out what to do about that, thought I'd put up the occasional story of his to see if people find them interesting. Major categories that might interest you are prospecting/naturalist, fishing, the first air mail pilots, and crime.

"Striking gold" is mainly a term to express when someone gets really lucky nowadays, but by golly, someone has actually done it. A 145-ounce gold nugget has been reportedly found in Victoria, Australia by a real life prospector and could be worth more than A$250,000 ($190,710) when it goes to auction. The big 'ol nugget has been named "Friday's Joy" on account of the day it was found.

There's gold in them leaves! They say money doesn't grow on trees, but gold and other precious metals can accumulate in plants. Researchers recently discovered relatively high levels of gold in the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia, before uncovering a deposit of the metal more than 100 feet beneath it. “Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist. Perhaps surprisingly, it's...

A MASSIVE gold nugget that could be worth upwards of half a million dollars has been unearthed in Ballarat. See your ad here The nugget, weighing slightly more than five kilograms (177 ounces), was discovered by a local prospector on Wednesday morning, who rushed it to the Ballarat Mining Exchange Gold Shop. The exact location and the identity of the lucky prospector remain secret, but gold shop owner Cordell Kent said the nugget was found within 30 kilometres of the Ballarat CBD. It was found about 60 centimetres below the surface, with the prospector using a state-of-the-art detector worth more...

Gold nuggets are sprouting like weeds on streams in the Sierra foothills. High water from melting snow is scouring feeder creeks this month that haven't been flushed clean for years. The flushing power can dislodge gold caught for eons in deep pockets and under rocks and propel it downstream. Eventually the weight of the gold causes it to fall to the stream bottom, often jamming between rocks in V-wedge crevices. There it waits for you. At more than $1,500 an ounce, this isn't a kids' game. Gold panning can yield gold flakes amid a layer of black sand. But sniping...

A Baton Rouge, LA woman visiting Arkansas' Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro found an apparently flawless 2.09-carat white diamond the size of a tooth. Rhonda Bankston reportedly says she found out about the park's surface diamond prospecting on a show about finding cash and treasure. She was into her second day of prospecting by surface searching over a newly plowed field with friends when she spotted the gem. The park is located on the eroded surface of the world's eighth largest diamond-bearing deposit and visitors pay a fee to surface search there.