The NASA Psyche Mission: An Electric Journey to a Metallic World

When our solar system was just an infant, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in fewer than one million years. Many melted, allowing metal cores to differentiate from rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may still exist, revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. I’ll discuss what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid, how we have planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this unknown object, how we progressed with the mission through COVID, with its intense challenges to teams, and an update of where we are 1 year post-launch. Finally, I’ll add a little about the need for stabilizing our tech manufacturing base to persist through future challenges like global population decline, and the attendant need for throughlines, communities that keep this knowledge completely vibrant.