Lights, camera … Psyche!
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission and ASU Regents Professor, is photographed during a video interview on the Tempe campus. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News
UPDATE, Oct. 11: NASA and SpaceX are standing down from the Oct. 12 launch of the agency’s Psyche mission due to unfavorable weather conditions. NASA and SpaceX are now targeting launch at 10:19 a.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 13, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Editor's note: On Sept. 28, NASA announced that the Psyche launch is now targeted for Oct. 12.
Sometimes you have to travel far into the skies to understand what’s deep beneath your feet.
That’s one of the reasons Arizona State University is leading NASA’s Psyche mission — set to launch Oct. 5 — a nearly six-year journey to an asteroid of the same name. That metal-rich asteroid might just be the core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.
Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets — including Earth — scientists infer the presence of metallic cores. But these are far below the planets' rocky mantles and crusts. Psyche will offer a unique window into the process that created terrestrial planets, something we’ll never be able to do here on Earth.
Psyche is the first ASU-led deep-space NASA mission, and it’s scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center the morning of Oct. 5 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Launch is set for 10:38 a.m. Eastern/7:38 a.m. Arizona time; a NASA livestreamed pre-show will begin about an hour before launch. (Sign up here to watch the launch online.)
MORE: Psyche news
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission and a Regents Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, took some time out of the busy lead-up to launch to talk about the mission and what they hope to discover about the asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
“We’re trying to learn about the origin of our rocky worlds like the Earth. How do you build a habitable planet that people can live on?” she said. “And one big ingredient is the metal core that’s in the middle of our planet. And it turns out, we are never, ever going to get to our core or the core of any other planet … but there’s this one body out there, Psyche. … It’s the only way humans are ever going to see that ingredient of planet building.
“We like to joke that we’re going to outer space to see inner space.”
Watch the rest of the interview in our video.
More Science and technology
Lessons on maintaining your humanity in the world of AI technology
AI is not human. But it does a good job of acting like it.It is capable of replicating how we speak, how we write and even how we solve problems.So it’s easy to see why many consider it a threat, or…
When you’re happy, your dog might look sad
When people are feeling happy, they’re more likely to see other people as happy. If they’re feeling down, they tend to view other people as sad. But when dealing with dogs, this well-established…
New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors
In 2009, scientists found eight bones from the foot of an ancient human ancestor within layers of million-year-old sediment in the Afar Rift in Ethiopia. The team, led by Arizona State University…