NASA Psyche Mission Flight Systems Engineer Christina Hernandez | JPL

NASA Psyche Mission Flight Systems Engineer Christina Hernandez | JPL

Behind the Spacecraft: Meet Christina Hernandez, a flight systems engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video Hernandez, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about getting Psyche ready for launch through the spacecraft’s verification-and-validation phase and her passion for heavy metal music.

Whether the asteroid Psyche 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. 

This is the first episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission.

Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.

Learn all about our first-of-its-kind Mission to Psyche: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche

For more information, go to: www.nasa.gov/psyche and psyche.asu.edu

Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Produced by: NASA 360 Productions

Duration: 2 minutes

Release Date: Aug. 22, 2023  

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