NASA Psyche Asteroid Mission: Power System Engineer Ben Inouye | JPL

NASA Psyche Asteroid Mission: Power System Engineer Ben Inouye | JPL

Meet Ben Inouye, a power system engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Inouye, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains what it was like to build the spacecraft’s power system. Inouye talks about the importance of the power system, as well as his passion for astrophotography.

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 third 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: 1 minute, 26 seconds

Release Date: Sept. 5, 2023

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