The NASA Psyche Mission: An Electric Journey to a Metal World
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Principal Investigator
“Psyche” is both the name of an asteroid in the main belt, orbiting out past Mars, and the name of our NASA mission to visit that asteroid. Our upcoming exploration of this asteroid marks an important first for humankind: We have sent people or robots to explore rocks bodies, like the Moon and Mars, and icy ones, like Europa and Enceladus, and gas-rich bodies like Jupiter, but never a body made mostly of metal. Psyche’s density, radar, and reflected light properties indicate that it is largely made of metal. If Psyche turns out to be what we think, we’ll be visiting a new kind of world.
In this talk, I’ll explain how a NASA mission comes to be, who is working on our team, and how far we’ve come in building this spacecraft and preparing to launch in 2023.
Psyche will surprise us. The universe always outsteps even our best imaginations. And our whole Psyche team looks forward to sharing all we discover with everyone here on Earth.
This will event will be available for attending both in person and online via zoom. To register for the online component, click here!
