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It's a shame, but living in the city, very rarely
do you get to see stars.
- I feel like I have a new connection to them
in a way that I haven't before.
- If I'm out in the desert and I look up
at the sky, you just see millions and millions
of places that we should be going.
- It's almost baked into our DNA the desire to
go and explore, right? That's the whole reason
why we left the forest and then traveled across
oceans, just to see what's out there.
- I was born in 1969, which is the year we
landed on the moon. So, I am a space baby.
- When I was a kid, there were guys driving
cars on the moon. They're driving cars on the moon.
That's so cool, right? I wanna do that.
- All the rocky planets that we know of all have
got a metal core in their center, and, especially
for the Earth it's the source of our magnetic
field. We don't know a lot about our core, what we've
learned about it we've learned indirectly,
because we can't go there.
- It's too hot. The pressure's too high, our
instruments would melt. Can't drill a hole that
deep in the Earth or other planets. Turns out, we can
study a planetary core out in space because there's
this one object, there's one object, called Psyche.
- 16 Psyche is an asteroid that orbits the
sun out between Mars and Jupiter.
It is the only asteroid that we are aware of, that
is 95% metal or more, and is really huge. It's about
200 kilometers across in one axis.
- So, it's about the size of Massachusetts.
- It's believed that it may be a remnant, core of
an early planetesimal that was formed in the very,
very earliest parts of the formation
of the solar system.
- And, after this planet started forming, and this
metal core formed inside of that, it collided with
other bodies that then stripped off the rocky
mantle, leaving this core in place.
- The first thing that came, actually, was the
theory. Some people from Jet Propulsion Laboratory
contacted me and said, "We would like to plan a
mission that would test your hypothesis."
- And that starts you down a road that takes years.
So we wrote a proposal to send a NASA spacecraft to
visit this, this big ball of metal. And then about
a year ago, Lindy gets a phone call. "You win!"
"Ahhh!" And then we're all like, "Oh my god, now
we have to do it."
- Psyche gives us the opportunity to visit a
core, the only way that humankind can ever do,
and it will be the first metal object that
humankind has ever visited.
- We've been approved to go in August of 2022.
So, we talked with our mission design and
navigation team and, in fact, they were able to
come up with what is probably the most optimal
trajectory, doing a Mars flyby.
- Flies past Mars, gives us a gravity assist, uses
that propulsion system to then slowly creep up
towards the end of 2025, getting there in early 2026.
- SSL is building the solar electric propulsion
chassis. When we do the mechanical, physical,
integration of each instrument on the
spacecraft, we'll work hand-in-hand with each of
the providers to get out to Psyche and do a
full discovery mission.
- We've figured out a way for many, many people to
build something together so complicated no one
person can understand it, but it all has to work
together perfectly for decades, without fail.
- Just the fact that these things work at all is a
thrill. It's just a testament to the engineers
at JPL and the companies that we collaborate with
that they can build these things.
- It's exciting for me to be able to me a woman
winning and leading a deep space mission. The only
previous woman who competed, won, and led a
deep space mission was Maria Zuber, who was my
friend and mentor at MIT. And so my drive is to make
everyone feel welcome, and to have every voice heard.
We want as many undergraduates as we can.
We want to involve as much as of the public as we can.
We want people to feel like this is their mission.
- You get that first picture back, and you
know, one of the first things that goes through
your mind is "Oh, thank god I didn't leave the
lens cap on." We will put our pictures out there as
soon as they come down. So, we'll discover at the
same time that the public discovers. We'll be
scratching our heads and it's like, "I don't know
what's going on," at the same time everybody else
is like, "Wow, what is that?" I don't know,
let's figure it out.
- I did get to look at Psyche through an optical
telescope in my backyard. Some wonderful colleagues
brought over their telescope on a fortuitous
night. It's a very, very tiny faint dot, and that
made a bunch of us cry, to think that we could send
something to investigate that speck of light.
- We can understand this universe that we live in.
We can explore it, we can learn about it, and we can
be a part of something which is much bigger than
just us or just this planet. We'll see new
things when we visit a world made of metal.