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NASA’s first mission to a mysterious world made primarily of metal rather than rock or ice is about to begin.
The Psyche mission is scheduled to lift off at 10:19 a.m. ET on Friday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If successful, Psyche will be the first of many NASA science missions scheduled to be launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
NASA is sharing a live stream of the launch.
Currently, the weather forecast has an 85% chance of favoring the launch. The launch period for this mission is open until October 25th.
The mission, named for the 16 Psyche asteroids it will observe, will travel about 2.2 billion miles (36 It is planned to travel 100 million kilometers). “We’re not going to be able to do that,” said David Orr, chief engineer for Psyche operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“We are embarking on a mission to a celestial body that humans have never before studied up close,” said Lindy, Psyche Principal Investigator and Foundation and Regents Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. – Elkins Tanton said. “This is the first time we’re visiting a world with metallic surfaces. There aren’t that many completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system that we can go see, so that’s what’s so exciting about this. ”
NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology/ASU
This illustration shows the NASA spacecraft entering orbit around asteroid 16 Psyche.
Scientists believe this large M-type, or metallic, asteroid could be the exposed core of an early planetary component, similar to the cores of the rocky planets in our solar system, including Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. I think there is a possibility that This core may have been exposed by a violent collision with another rocky body during the early formation of the solar system.
Telescopes on the ground and in space have previously observed Psyche, primarily detecting radiation bouncing off the reflective metal on the asteroid’s surface. Taken together, these observations helped scientists develop a model of the asteroid’s shape. It’s about the same size as Massachusetts, excluding Cape Cod., The surface area is comparable to California, Elkins Tanton said.
But even with the Hubble Space Telescope, Psyche can only be seen by a few pixels.
“We don’t know what Psyche looks like,” Elkins-Tanton said. “I always joke that it’s potato-shaped because potatoes come in so many different shapes, and that’s not true. But you’ll find out when you get there.”
The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in October 2022, but has suffered commensurate delays.
Last year, there wasn’t enough time to conduct a full checkout of the spacecraft’s flight software to ensure it was ready before the end of the 11-week launch period. And this year’s launch window has been set from October 5 to October to give engineers enough time to adjust the temperature limits of the spacecraft’s nitrogen-cold gas thrusters used to orient the spacecraft. It was postponed to the 12th.
“This was a serious issue that we had to address because there was a potential risk of the thruster overheating,” said Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And if we had discovered this and not done our due diligence, we probably would have discovered it right away.”
Once Psyche is launched, a Falcon Heavy rocket will power the spacecraft for the beginning of its long journey into space before separation. The Falcon Heavy’s side booster will likely land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, creating a sonic boom that can be heard by local residents, and will be used on future missions.
Once in space, the team will spend three to four months conducting initial checks on the spacecraft and its equipment.
To accomplish the remainder of its mission, the van-sized spacecraft will rely on a new solar power system powered by Hall-effect thrusters, Oh said. The thruster uses the spacecraft’s large solar array to “use electricity to ionize xenon gas and noble gases and accelerate those charged ions through an electric field to very high speeds,” Oh said.
The result was a speed five times faster than the fuel released in a typical chemical rocket.
The Psyche spacecraft will arrive at Mars in May 2026 and use Mars’ gravity to effectively direct its orbit toward Psyche. The mission will arrive at the asteroid in late July 2029 and spend 26 months orbiting the asteroid, mapping its surface, taking images, and determining whether Psyche really has a metallic core. I plan to. The spacecraft will orbit the asteroid in various orbits, ranging from 440 miles (708 kilometers) away to just 40 miles (64 kilometers) above the surface.
The Psyche mission’s imagers will begin transmitting data to Earth as soon as the spacecraft discovers the asteroid.
There will also be a Deep Space Optical Communications Technology Demonstration (DSOC). The experiment, which will take place during the first two years of the journey to Psyche, will be NASA’s furthest experiment in high-bandwidth laser communications, using invisible near-infrared lasers to test sending and receiving data to Earth. .
The laser can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than traditional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If this technology demonstration is successful, DSOC could one day be used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.
The spacecraft’s instruments will help scientists determine the asteroid’s chemical and mineral composition, topography, mass, gravitational field, and rotation. The mission’s magnetometer will attempt to detect evidence of a magnetic field around Psyche, which could suggest that the space rock first formed as a planetary core.
Dense Psyche is primarily made of iron and nickel, as well as something that could be rock, sulfur, or carbon-based, Elkins-Tanton said.
If Psyche is not a core, it may be a rare object left over from the formation of the solar system that has never been observed before.
“Another idea is that Psyche is basically a kind of primordial undissolved object that formed from the first matter in the solar system, came together under gravity, and has been preserved in this pristine state ever since. ,” said Ben Weiss, Psyche’s deputy principal investigator and magnetometer. lead. Weiss is a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Psyche may have formed near the Sun, and over time the oxygen atoms were stripped from the iron atoms and reduced to the metal. This object was hypothesized but never discovered.
The scientific team is keen to observe the features of the asteroid’s surface. Radar shows that there are two large craters on the surface of the earth. But what do metal craters look like? Elkins-Tanton says Psyche may have small metal spikes or spiers within the crater, or even tiny pieces resembling a type of metallic sand. said. It’s also possible that Psyche experienced a volcanic eruption, creating huge cliffs and greenish-yellow lava flows due to sulfur content.
“This is our scientifically motivated belief, and it’s almost certainly completely wrong,” Elkins-Tanton said. “We’re going to be surprised when we get there. I think it’s very likely that it’s going to be more than we ever imagined, and that’s my biggest hope.”