NASA's Psyche Mission: A Journey to Explore a $10 Quintillion Metal Asteroid

The Psyche spacecraft is traveling to a unique metal-rich asteroid with the same name, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. By August 2029 the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid that scientists think – because of its high metal content – may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.

TYPE:
Orbiter

LAUNCH:
Oct. 13, 2023

TARGET:
Asteroid Psyche

OBJECTIVE:
Visit an unexplored type of world – a metal-rich asteroid called Psyche.

Psyche’s main computer, flight software, fault-protection systems, and most of the telecommunications systems come from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. A Palo Alto, California, division of Colorado-based Maxar Technologies provided the main body of the spacecraft and most of its engineering hardware systems.

The spacecraft also includes a technology demonstration. Attached to Psyche is the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), a NASA experiment that will test optical, or laser, communications beyond the Moon.