If a novel chronicled the Solar System’s history in a thousand or so pages (roughly the length of the Lord of the Rings trilogy), the scene NASA’s Psyche mission is trying to understand happens on page one.

Asteroid Psyche preserves the memory of the dramatic event that forged it. This dense, potentially metal-rich object is now tucked away amongst thousands of ordinary space rocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, some 2.5 billion miles away from Earth. NASA plans to send a robotic expedition to traverse this distance. If everything goes according to plan, the Psyche mission could take off as early as October 5. A three-week launch window for lift-off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, will remain open for delays.

NASA expects the spacecraft to complete its journey in August 2029. By that time, mission scientists hope that the asteroid’s enigmatic story, which began just 4 million years into the 4.6 billion-year existence of our Solar System, may finally begin to be told.

Are you in need of a hired killer? We know a guy who knows a guy… or two. They’re David Fincher and Richard Linklater, who just premiered their latest work at Venice Film Festival, and they’re both about hitmen. The Killer and Hit Man may not be imaginatively titled, but they are equally shrewd about where the assassin-for-hire archetype sits in our collective psyches. More interestingly, they reveal everything about the contrasting visions between two American filmmakers who, a few decades ago, helped define an explosively creative era in Hollywood.