New Video Series Reveals What Drives NASA’s Psyche Mission Team

Jul 09, 2023

Members of NASA’s Psyche mission – from left, Luis Dominguez, Christina Hernandez, Meena Sreekantamurthy, Julie Li, and Ben Inouye – are featured in a new “Behind the Spacecraft” video series from the agency.

These short videos offer glimpses of the people who’ve helped make this upcoming journey to a metal-rich asteroid possible.

What motivates someone to labor for years to help build something that will be rocketed into space, never to be seen again on our planet? For the scientists, engineers, and technicians behind NASA’s Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid, the answers are wide-ranging but share a common thread: a passion to explore the unknown.

That inspiration is highlighted in the new “Behind the Spacecraft” video series, in which five members of the Psyche team tell the story of how they ended up on a mission designed to answer questions about the mysterious asteroid Psyche.

Watch a trailer about the series here:

Meet some of the engineers who helped build NASA’s Psyche mission, which is set to launch in October on a journey of 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name.

Produced by NASA 360, the videos will be released weekly on Tuesdays starting Aug. 22. JPL will host a livestream with Julie Li at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) Sept. 13 and one with Luis Dominguez at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) Sept. 20 on JPL YouTube, Facebook, and X. Questions can be submitted via the livestream chats.

Also, Psyche experts will answer questions about the mission in a NASA Science Live show airing at 3:30 p.m. EDT (12:30 p.m. PDT) Wednesday, Aug. 23. The broadcast will appear on NASA YouTube, Facebook, and X, as well as on NASA TV. Viewers can submit questions on social media using the hashtag #askNASA or by leaving a comment in the chat section of the Facebook or YouTube stream.

Psyche is set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:38 a.m. EDT (7:38 a.m. PDT) on Oct. 5, with additional opportunities scheduled through Oct. 25.

Measuring about 173 miles (279 kilometers) at its widest point, the asteroid Psyche may be the partial core of a planetesimal (one of the building blocks of a rocky planet), or it could be primordial material that never melted. The Psyche mission aims to find out, and to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system. Once the spacecraft reaches Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in 2029, it will spend at least 26 months orbiting its target, gathering images and other data that will tell scientists more about the asteroid’s history and what it is made of.

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Arizona State University leads the Psyche mission. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis.

JPL also is providing a technology demonstration instrument called Deep Space Optical Communications that will fly on Psyche in order to test high-data-rate laser communications that could be used by future NASA missions.

Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more information about NASA’s Psyche mission go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/psyche

Gretchen McCartney / Melissa Pamer

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-6215 / 626-314-4928

[email protected] / [email protected]

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson

NASA Headquarters, Washington

301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501

[email protected] / [email protected]

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