Forbes | NASA is about to begin building its latest spacecraft. Called
“Psyche” it will explore a 140 miles/226 kilometers-wide asteroid called
“16 Psyche.” Today it’s passed a major milestone.
Why is NASA going to ‘16 Psyche?’
Located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter, metal-rich 16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic
iron, nickel and gold core of a protoplanet. Most asteroids are rocky or icy.
The Psyche mission is part of NASA’s Discovery Program of low-cost robotic space missions.
16 Psyche’s core is tantalisingly similar to Earth’s, which means that it could be the heart of a dead planet that lost its rocky outer layers or suffered from violent collisions.
The metals that make-up this one-of-a-kind asteroid could, according to some, be worth $10,000 quadrillion.
Due to launch from Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2022 on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket,
fly-past Mars in 2023, and begin orbiting the asteroid in January
2026, Psyche has just passed its “critical design review” stage.
Now the mission moves to actually making the space hardware.
“It’s one of the most intense reviews a mission goes through in its
entire life cycle,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for
the Psyche mission. “And we passed with flying colors. The challenges
are not over, and we’re not at the finish line, but we’re running
strong.”
The team now has to build its three science instruments:
- a magnetometer to measure the asteroid’s magnetic field.
- a multispectral imager to capture images of its surface and data, about what its made of, and its geological features.
- spectrometers that analyze the neutrons and gamma rays coming from the surface to reveal what the asteroid is made of.
Assembly and testing of the full robotic spacecraft begins in
February 2021, and everything has to be in the clean room at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by April 2021.
The main spacecraft chassis is now being built at Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California.
