Behind the Spacecraft

Meet Ben Inouye, a power system engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Inouye, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains what it was like to build the spacecraft’s power system. Inouye talks about the importance of the power system, as well as his passion for astrophotography.

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.