The NASA Psyche mission is a unique and ambitious project aimed at exploring a metal-rich asteroid named Psyche, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter¹². Here are some key details about the mission:
Launch: The mission was launched on October 13, 2023, from the Kennedy Space Center¹². The spacecraft was carried into space by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket¹.
Objective: The primary objective of the mission is to visit and study an unexplored type of world – a metal-rich asteroid called Psyche¹. This is NASA’s first mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice¹.
Spacecraft: The Psyche spacecraft is equipped with solar arrays and its main computer, flight software, fault-protection systems, and most of the telecommunications systems come from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California¹. Attached to Psyche is the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), a NASA experiment that will test optical, or laser, communications beyond the Moon¹.
Science Goals: The mission aims to understand a previously unexplored building block of planet formation: iron cores². It will also explore a new type of world made not of rock and ice, but metal².
Arrival: By August 2029, the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid that scientists think – because of its high metal content – may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet¹.
This mission offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets². It's an exciting step forward in our understanding of the solar system!
Source: Conversation with Copilot, 12/08/2024
(1) Psyche - NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/.
(2) Psyche - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche.
(3) Psyche (spacecraft) - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_%28spacecraft%29.
(4) en.wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft).
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