NASA's Psyche Mission—Journey to a Metal World: Behind the Spacecraft | JPL

NASA's Psyche Mission—Journey to a Metal World: Behind the Spacecraft | JPL

Meet some of the engineers contributing to NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. This trailer previews the team members profiled in the series whose work will help scientists understand the story behind this unusual asteroid.

Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (one of the building blocks 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. 

Each week, this five-part video series will introduce a Psyche team member who will tell the story of how they came to join the mission: Christina Hernandez, Meena Sreekantamurthy, Ben Inouye, Julie Li, and Luis Dominguez.

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

More About the Psyche Mission

Arizona State University leads the Psyche mission. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Maxar is providing the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis. Psyche was selected in 2017 as the 14th mission under NASA’s Discovery Program.

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

For more information about NASA’s Psyche mission go to: www.nasa.gov/psyche and psyche.asu.edu

Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Produced by: NASA 360 Productions

Duration: 2 minutes

Release Date: Aug. 21, 2023

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