Welcome to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Today, we are in a Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room, which is why
everyone you'll see here is wearing protective gear and frocks like me.
So, in this room spacecraft have been built for decades.
But today, we've invited members of the media to the clean room to learn
more about one of JPL's upcoming missions - and that's the Psyche spacecraft.
It's on a mission to study a giant asteroid, which is believed
to be rich in metal and could give us a unique opportunity
to study how planets like our own Earth may have formed.
Now it's set to launch in August, so soon Psyche is going to leave JPL
and head over to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
And today, we have a chance to talk to two experts.
So if you have any questions you'd like to ask use the ask NASA
hashtag or leave your questions in the comments below.
And first up, we have Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the principal investigator on Psyche.
Thank you for joining us today. (Lindy) Thank you so much.
I'm very excited to talk with you.
(Raquel) Now, What is the first thing people should know about Psyche?
(Lindy) All right.
Why do we go to space? Humans, we can't help it.
We have to explore.
We've always explored our planet.
Now we're exploring in space.
There aren't that many kinds of worlds and places
in our solar system that we've never had a picture, we've never explored.
Psyche is one of them - it's a new kind of world.
That's why it's so exciting to go there.
And as
a principal Investigator, what is your role on the mission?
I am officially the lead of the mission.
But I'm a scientist, so I don't know everything.
My job is to make sure the science of the return - science
return of the mission is successful and to try to keep the team working
in the right and best direction
that I possibly can, working with all the other leaders.
And now I want to know, what are you most excited
about, personally, when it comes to Psyche?
You know, I'm very, very excited about the science.
I'm hoping this is something very unusual and exciting.
But beyond that, I think the reason that I'm most motivated to do this
is because I think it gives this story of hope in the future for humans.
There's so much that's scary in the world right now.
But space exploration is a story of hope and a story of what we can do
when we all work together.
It's kind of a miracle.
We can do this and go to space.
Think of the things we can solve here on Earth.
And could
you tell us a little more about the Psyche mission in general?
What are some of the key goals?
The psyche asteroid - of course, we named our spacecraft Psyche
after the asteroid where we're going - we think it's made largely of metal.
We think it could be part of the metal core of a little planet
that got broken apart and stranded in the asteroid belt
instead of joining up and becoming a part of Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars.
So if it is a part of a core, well, it's the only way
humans are ever going to see a core because we can't go to ours.
The pressure is way too much. The temperature is way too much.
So it's a way of looking inside of the earth by going to outer space.
And how does it feel to be
inside this clean room right now and seeing Psyche behind you?
I've been working on this for 11 years, which is a short time
in space mission terms, but it's a long time in anyone's life.
And the fact that we've gone from this tiny idea to this
beautiful giant spacecraft, it feels a bit like a miracle.
I'm really excited.
Thank you so much for talking to us.
Can you kind of give us a little timeline
of what will happen after launch with Psyche?
Yes, so we expect
and hope to launch August 1st or thereabouts.
So then once it separates from the rocket, the giant solar arrays will unfold
and Psyche will start moving out toward the asteroid.
In the first year,
we're going to test the Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration,
which is communicating with the earth using lasers instead of radio waves.
And then eventually, after three years we'll reach the asteroid
and we'll start doing the science of the asteroid itself.
And one
thing that I think is really cool is this isn't even all of Psyche, right?
There's going to be more that people will see
when we have the spacecraft behind us
that they'll see the solar arrays that will be attached to it.
That's right.
Our solar arrays are not attached right now.
They're being tested elsewhere, but they're huge
when they're completely unfolded, as they will be in space.
The spacecraft and the solar arrays are as big as a singles tennis court.
And the solar arrays create 20 kilowatts
of energy here at the radius of Earth.
And exactly where is the Psyche asteroid located?
The Psyche asteroid orbits in the outer main belt of the asteroid belt,
meaning that it's way out past Mars, sometimes closer to Jupiter.
It's very far from the Earth.
That's its stable orbit out there in the asteroid belt.
Well,
thank you so much, Lindy, for answering all our questions.
We might come back to you if we get some more social media questions coming in.
(Lindy) Love it.
(Raquel) And if you have a question you'd like to ask, use the hashtag
ask NASA or leave your questions in the comments below.
Next up, we're going to go to talk to project manager, Henry Stone.
He's somewhere around here.
Yeah, let's see.
There he is. Let's go find him.
Hi, Henry.
We are live right now.
We're hoping we could ask you a couple of questions about the Psyche mission.
So for you, what does it mean to be a project manager
on a mission like Psyche?
A project manager on a mission like this?
Well, I equate it to being like an orchestra conductor, right?
Building a spacecraft as incredible as this or any system that's this
sophisticated requires an enormous number of people with a lot of different skills.
And you've got to bring that all together and you've got to make sure
it's all coordinated, right?
Everybody's developing all of their pieces at the right time,
interacting together properly in order to build that.
So it's just keeping everybody on on the right tune
to make sure that we stay on schedule.
We build the right thing, and we're ready to go for launch.
And can you kind of break down the instruments on Psyche for us?
The science instruments is kind of really three plus one.
All right.
So in
order to get the scientific measurements we need, we have a suite.
You can see them up there behind you, up on the far boom.
There we have a gamma ray neutron spectrometer that was built at the Applied
Physics Laboratory, and that is going to be used to detect
elemental metallic composition of the surface of Mars,
looking for the iron nickel, aluminum - what it's made of.
On this other boom here you'll see these little domes.
Those are two magnetometers.
And they will be used to detect
whether or not Psyche has a magnetic field and if so,
how strong that field is and what the characteristics
and shape of that magnetic field are.
And that's really key toward helping us understand whether Psyche was
an early core of an early planetesimal when the solar system was formed.
So that's two of the three.
The third of the three key scientific instruments actually is a pair
of telescopic imagers with filter wheels.
Unfortunately, in this configuration, you can't see those.
They're pointing up right now
at the ceiling in this room on that side of the of the spacecraft.
And they'll be pointing out and they'll be used to take a map -
build a map, a visual map of the entire surface of Psyche.
We can understand the surface topography, understand,
you know, craters and use that to discu- determine the relative age of the body.
But perhaps most importantly is that each is equipped with a filter wheel.
And the filters have been chosen so that if you take images
at those different light
wavelengths, you can
actually determine what the mineralogical composition of the surface is.
So that and the gamma ray between the metals and the silicates,
we can understand
how much of this is a rocky body, how much of this is a metallic body.
The fourth one is gravity science.
This is a very odd shaped body.
It's kind of like a potato.
All right.
And it probably will have a very unique and odd gravitational field
we can't safely go into orbit around that, too.
We understand what that gravitational field looks like.
And so our X-band telecom system that we used to communicate
to get receive data from
and command the spacecraft actually does that tracking of the spacecraft.
So we start to go into orbit at a very high orbit
that gravitational field will affect the motion of the spacecraft.
And we can measure that and then determine and build
the detailed model of the gravitational field.
Once we have that and we can get to successively lower and lower orbits
to allow our instruments to get better and better and more refined measurements
to make the science.
So that's the science instruments suite for Psyche.
I like the break down and the description of the potato. It's
my favorite part.
Now we have a question coming in on social media.
(Henry) Yes.
(Raquel) Elias on Facebook asks How long will it take to complete
a spacecraft with planning and finishing up to completion - so the whole process?
The whole process.
Well, the earliest concept for this mission was developed
by the principal investigator over 10 years ago, right?
About five years ago or six years ago or so,
she had approached folks at JPL about her scientific hypotheses
and some engineers here said, Hey, that's a really cool hypothesis, and we think
we can develop a spacecraft that could fly the instruments you need out there.
And so she began working with us, and we put in a proposal to NASA
to fly this mission.
And we were selected about five years ago.
So the real you know, there's that kind of very early part.
But once we got selected
and it became serious, this is going to be a mission to fly
five years of development.
Start with an early design and analysis, figuring out exactly what you need.
Who's going to provide the various pieces, etc.
And then you start building you start building up the individual components,
testing those, and then you move into system integration.
And this is the tail end of system integration that you're looking at.
That's taking all the myriad of pieces that are necessary
that were already tested at the component level and put them together
to make the overall spacecraft and then test the overall spacecraft.
So that's referred to as ATLO - ATLO is Assembly Test and Launch Operations.
And and we're in the very final stages.
The spacecraft as you see it right here, is essentially
how it will be flying in space.
Right.
They're just buttoning it up right now.
You can see all this other equipment over here is being packed up and stacked
and getting ready for shipment.
We're going to be shipping the spacecraft at the end of this month on April 29th.
It will be brought to March Air Force Base in a special shipping container.
It will be put on a C-17 and flown directly into Cape Canaveral.
And then we will open it up,
do some more testing and get ready to start integrating it,
loading it on top of the rocket that'll launch it from Cape Canaveral. And
our plan is to launch
in August of this year and get it on its way.
From there, that's when the actual mission, so to say,
starts as opposed to just a project in the building,
it's going to take us three and a half years to fly out to Psyche.
We're going to spiral out.
We're going to pass Mars and get a gravity assist.
We're going to use our electric propulsion engines to thrust all the way,
spiral out, catch up with Psyche and its orbit.
It's way on the outer edge of the main asteroid belt,
which is between Mars and Jupiter.
So it's way out there, three times the distance, 3.3 times
the distance from the sun, as the earth is so way out there.
It will take three and a half years and then we will spend two years at Psyche
orbiting at successively lower and lower orbits
to take the measurements I was just talking about to try and prove
the hypothesis as to whether or not Psyche was the core of a very early planet
formed, you know, in the blink of an eye when the solar system was created.
And that will help us
to confirm whether or
not our models of the formation are, in fact, correct.
And if they're not, the thing that's really cool is
then this will be an exceptionally unique and odd
discovery.
So no matter what happens, this is going to be a mission
of discovery, of what we believe is a metallic world.
It's a great answer and a great question.
Thank you, Elias.
We have another question coming in.
Amir on Facebook asks,
why not study the nearby asteroids in the asteroid belt?
Why Psyche?
Well, this is in the asteroid belt.
It's on the outer reaches of it. Okay.
But the little bit of data
we have from measurements from telescopes
where it's only four little teeny pixels and an image and from radar data
leads us to the conclusion at the moment that it is largely metal.
Almost all the other asteroids are rocky bodies.
Okay.
This one stands out as very unique, as having a very high
concentration of metal to explain why it's so massive.
It's also very large.
You know, many of the asteroids are very, very small.
This is one of the larger ones.
It's basically the size of Massachusetts, right?
The entire state.
And that's what makes it, makes it
unique and unique in understanding the formation of the solar system.
We have two more questions coming in.
One of them is from Kirin on Facebook.
Why haven't optical communications been used
'til now for this?
Ah, Kirin, very good question.
So obviously, Kirin, you know that we are flying the DSOC instrument,
the Deep Space Optical Comms,
that's actually not part of the science of this mission.
But we are hosting that instrument as a technology demonstration for NASA, right?
So what happens is that instrument was also developed here at JPL.
And the goal is to try and come up with a means to communicate
with spacecraft in the future with much higher bandwidth
so that we can have live videos like this from Mars.
That's exactly what we're trying to to show how to do that.
So that instrument will be communicating with laser light as
opposed to radio frequency,
sending
signals right back down to a telescope here in California,
the Palomar Telescope, where they can detect
the individual photons coming from the spacecraft.
And you'll be able to communicate at much higher rates.
Why, why not more sooner than this?
Yeah. Well,
it is a really, really difficult thing to do.
You are talking about really large distances to communicate,
and you have to have enough energy
to send a light
beam down and collect it when it hits Earth.
Right.
And that beam is going to, you know, expand out
and and get lower and lower power as it gets to you.
So the technology, that's a technology demonstration
of how to not just detect a burst of light
coming and telling you what the spacecraft is trying to say.
Do it down to the elemental of each individual photons
is what makes that instrument so incredibly sophisticated in terms
of its pointing-at-communication ability So it's taken a long time to get there
and we're looking forward to that being equally successful
to help all our future missions, particularly those to Mars.
Right.
We've got human exploration coming up eventually.
We'd like to have live video.
Yes, that would be wonderful to see, and the final question we have is
Kirin on - oh, it's actually Terry on Facebook.
I'll kind of chime in, too.
Terry wants to know what is the most anxiety inducing part of the project?
But also for you, what is the most exciting part?
What's the anxiety part,
I guess, is just missions like this.
You can't just launch any time you want.
You can't launch when you're ready, so to say.
You have to - it's planetary.
You've got to go with a specific launch window.
You can't move that around.
It's a really hard date.
And these are incredibly complex and sophisticated, you know, robotic
explorers.
The stress of trying to make sure that you get it all done and test it
and it's ready to go on that fixed date is probably the most anxiety
ridden one.
And the second part of the question, I'm sorry, was the...?
Most exciting part for you.
The most exciting part, yeah. Oh,
well, it's kind of twofold.
It's the science, right?
You're going to explore this body that no one's ever been to before.
Right.
The the
second part for me as an engineer really is having the opportunity
to work with a fabulous team of people,
specialists, in all different areas, and to orchestrate that in order
to build these incredibly complicated, sophisticated pieces of equipment.
That as an engineer just, just floats my boat.
Well, this is very exciting.
Thank you so much for talking to us today.
And there's lots of members of the.
Media coming in right now that have questions for you as well.
So I'll let you get to that.
Thank you very much. (Raquel) Thank you.
Now, Psyche is set to launch in August from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Now to learn more about the mission, follow at NASA JPL
and at NASA solar system, and also
follow the hashtag Mission To Psyche.
Thanks for watching.