Mission to Psyche: One Year Into the Spacecraft’s Journey to a Metal-Rich Asteroid
One year after a successful launch on Oct. 13, 2023, team members on the Psyche mission to the metal-rich asteroid of the same name reflect on launch day, discuss mission operations and accomplishments since launch, and look forward to upcoming milestones, including a flyby of Mars in May 2026.
Whether the Psyche asteroid is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.
The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Riding along with the spacecraft is the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration, which has been transmitting data at the highest rate ever achieved from deep space beyond the Moon.
Learn about this first-of-its-kind mission at: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche and https://psyche.asu.edu/.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Produced by: True Story Films
Transcript
Everybody was so ready to see this thing go to space. I showed up at the mission support area. Of course, it's buzzing with activity, and everyone's feeling good. It was maybe a good thing that everybody was pouring all of their anxious energy into tiny problems. People checking, rechecking, making sure that all of the things that kept them up at night, they managed to address.
It was like coming a little bit out of a dream just thinking about all the little details.
8, 7, 6, 5, 4.
Right when it launches, you get the big picture just washing over you.
Engine ignition.
It is the most astonishing show of power, and I could not almost believe what I was seeing.
I mean, by the time you're looking up at this thing, it's like you can just feel every every ripple of the engine. You feel it just kind of cascade through your chest. I mean, it's it's it's the most amazing feeling.
And there go the fairings, revealing Psyche to the atmosphere.
We had this beautiful video feed and we could see as it just started to drift away.
It was perfect. No spin, no tumble, anything. Just slowly moving away from the launch vehicle.
We thought it could be hours before we heard from the spacecraft. Basically, as soon as it turned on its radios, we got that signal and we actually had data from the spacecraft for the duration of the solar array deployment, so we could really confirm that that was working.
The turn on of the instruments has gone extremely well. The magnetometer, the gamma ray spectrometer, the neutron spectrometer, the imagers, the gravity experiment we know is gonna be successful. We've turned on our electric propulsion, first use of hall thrusters outside of the Earth Moon system. And even our technology demonstration, the deep space optical comms, doing laser communication.
I think we've downloaded data now at 260 megabits per second. Way, way faster than anything that's been downloaded from space before. The next big thing that I'm really looking forward to is the Mars flyby. I wanna see what we can do with the instruments or what the instruments can tell us about Mars. And that'll be the first time that, you know, we fill the field of view of the cameras with something illuminated. So I I I think that that'll be a really exciting moment.
In my heart, what I really would love for it to be is that ours was a mission that ignited in so many people the thrill of wanting to see the unknown. Oh my gosh, wait till we get there.