Psyche Electrical Engineer Luis Dominguez – Behind the Spacecraft

Meet Luis Dominguez, an engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Dominguez, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the JPL clean room where he and the assembly, test, and launch operations team are putting together and testing the spacecraft. He also talks about his passion for outreach and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers. 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 final 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. 20 for a livestreamed Q&A with Dominguez. Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.