The NASA Psyche Mission: First Journey to an Unknown World

The NASA Psyche mission is on its way to orbit a small but immensely ancient world in our asteroid belt: A metallic object, the first humans will ever have visited. When our solar system was in its infancy, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in less than a million years. (If the history of the entire solar system were compressed to a single day, the planetesimals would have formed in the first 18 seconds!) Many planetesimals later melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may be revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. Dr. Elkins-Tanton will discuss what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid, explain how they planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this unknown object, and update us of where we are over two years post-launch.

Speaker: Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, UC Berkeley