Psyche Power Electronics Engineer Meena Sreekantamurthy – Behind the Spacecraft

Meet Meena Sreekantamurthy, a power electronics engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Sreekantamurthy, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, explains how power is critical for gathering the mission’s science data. She also talks about her passion for painting and drawing. 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 second 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.