Tech Talk: Psyche - Rescheduled

The Psyche spacecraft, built by Maxar in partnership with NASA JPL, is flying to 16-Psyche, an all-metal asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Humanity has never before explored a world like it. But terrestrial planets like Earth are presumed to have metallic cores beneath their crusts. Psyche will hopefully help us learn more about planet cores: how planets are formed or how they get ripped apart. If it could be mined, 16-Psyche could be worth $10,000 quadrillion (that’s 19 zeros).

The program was first proposed in 2011, NASA put out the initial proposal in 2014, and JPL and Maxar were awarded the contract in 2017.  It was launched on October (Friday the) 13th, 2023, and left the Earth on a Falcon Heavy faster than any other human-made object. At 5 months into the mission, the spacecraft is healthy. It is expected to reach 16-Psyche in August 2029.

Psyche is adapted from the Maxar 1300 series bus, which was designed as a geostationary (GEO) communications and remote sensing platform. It has 4 highly efficient electric propulsion thrusters and 12 “simple” cold gas thrusters. The electric propulsion produces about as much force as getting hit in the head with a piece of paper. With no atmospheric drag can accelerate objects to incredibly high speeds, but also be used to get into orbit around the asteroid and spiral down to low altitudes.  Between the thrusters and a Mars flyby, it will reach 124,000mph relative to Earth before orbiting the asteroid. For comparison, the Lucy mission (launched in 2021) with a chemical propulsion system will visit multiple asteroids via short duration flybys.

In addition to the primary asteroid mission, Psyche also hosts the laser-based DSOC (Deep Space Optical Communications) technology demonstration, which is breaking records on how much data can be transferred from deep space.

Speaker: Ian Johnson, Maxar Space Systems

This talk has been rescheduled for May 23, 2024.