World Space Week and the Psyche mission

To celebrate World Space Week (Oct. 4-Oct.10), lets look at a story about the mission to Psyche, scheduled to launch Oct. 12, 2023. Named after the Greek goddess of the soul, the Psyche mission is a NASA-led space exploration project that aims to study the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The asteroid is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission is scheduled to launch on October 12, 2023.

The primary objective of the mission is to explore the origin of planetary cores by orbiting and studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. The spacecraft will examine a landscape unlike anything explored before and map its features, structure, composition, and magnetic field.

Psyche is unique because it appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system. Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets – including Earth – scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets’ rocky mantles and crusts. Because we cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.

The mission is led by Arizona State University. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is responsible for mission management, operations, and navigation. The spacecraft’s solar-electric propulsion chassis will be built by Maxar (formerly SSL) with a payload that includes an imager, magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer.

The Psyche mission will test a sophisticated new laser communication technology that encodes data in photons at near-infrared wavelengths (rather than radio waves) to communicate between a probe in deep space and Earth. Using light instead of radio allows the spacecraft to communicate more data in a given amount of time.

The scientific objectives of the mission are as follows:

• Determine whether Psyche is a core or if it is unmelted material.
• Determine the relative ages of regions of Psyche’s surface.
• Determine whether small metal bodies incorporate the same light elements as are expected in Earth’s high-pressure core.
• Determine whether Psyche was formed under conditions more oxidizing or more reducing than Earth’s core.
• Characterize Psyche’s topography.

The scientific instruments and investigations used in this mission are:

• Multispectral Imager
• Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer
• Magnetometer
• X-band Gravity Science Investigation
• Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC).

For more information on the status of Psyche, visit NASA’s Psyche Mission blog. Some videos below to learn more: