NASA’s Psyche Mission

B-roll for media. NASA's Psyche mission, scheduled to launch in October 2023, is the first to a metal-rich asteroid (also named Psyche). This reel includes animations of the Psyche spacecraft and asteroid, and footage of engineers in clean rooms at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and near the launch site at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The team is assembling the spacecraft and integrating several key components, including the thrusters, the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and the magnetometer.

The b-roll also shows the installation of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, an independent technology demonstration that will fly on the spacecraft to test high-data-rate laser communications that could be used by future NASA missions. (It is not intended to transmit Psyche data.) The reel also includes soundbites from Psyche's principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

Scientists think the Psyche asteroid may consist of a significant amount of metal from the core of a planetesimal, one of the building blocks of the rocky planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. If so, it could provide a unique opportunity to study how planets like Earth formed.

Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin to orbit the asteroid Psyche in 2029.

For more information about NASA's Psyche mission, go to: nasa.gov/psyche and psyche.asu.edu/

For more information about DSOC, go to: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/dsoc/index.html

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Cory S Huston