August 27, 2023

Meet Christina Hernandez, a flight systems engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video Hernandez, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about getting Psyche ready for launch through the spacecraft’s verification-and-validation phase and her passion for heavy metal music.

Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.

This is the first episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission. Join us on this channel on Sept. 13 and 20 for livestreamed Q&As with team members as well.

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