Presenter
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist, the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative. Her research concerns the formation and evolution of rocky planets, as well as on effective teams and future-facing educational practices. She has led four field expeditions in central Siberia. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2022 William Morrow published her memoir, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.
Abstract:
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.
