NASA Psyche Mission Electrical Engineer Luis Dominguez | JPL

NASA Psyche Mission Electrical Engineer Luis Dominguez | JPL

Behind the Spacecraft: Meet Luis Dominguez, an engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Dominguez, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), shows the JPL clean room where he and the assembly, test, and launch operations team are putting together and testing the spacecraft. He also talks about his passion for outreach and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers.

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. 

Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will 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.

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's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Produced by: NASA 360 Productions

Duration: 1 minute, 36 seconds

Release Date: Sept. 19, 2023

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