Unique Psyche Asteroid Mission to reveal secrets of violent past, birth of planets

NASA will go forwards with its Psyche Asteroid Mission and targets a launch period of October 2023 for the same.

Know when NASA can launch its Psyche Asteroid Mission. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

Since NASA cannot dig a hole deep enough in the Earth, it is going asteroid visiting millions of miles from here. NASA on Saturday informed that it will go forwards with its Psyche Asteroid Mission and will target a launch period next year- opening on October 10, 2023. It can be known that the Psyche Asteroid Mission was planned to launch this year that is- 2022. However, it missed the same due to mission development problems. "Earlier this year, Psyche missed its planned 2022 launch period as a result of mission development problems, leading to an internal review of whether the mission would be able to overcome these issues to successfully launch in 2023," NASA said in a report.

This continuation/termination review was informed by a project-proposed mission replan and a separate independent review, commissioned in June by NASA and the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, that investigated causes for the delay, the research organisation added. The independent review board is still finalizing its report, which, along with NASA's response, will be shared publicly once complete.

According to the research agency, the mission team continues to complete testing of the spacecraft's flight software in preparation for the 2023 launch date. The new flight profile is similar to the one originally planned for August 2022, using a Mars gravity assist in 2026 to send the spacecraft on its way to the asteroid Psyche. With an October 2023 launch date, the Psyche spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid in August 2029.

Psyche Asteroid Mission

The Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. What makes the asteroid Psyche unique is that it appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system.

"Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets - including Earth - scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets' rocky mantles and crusts. Because we cannot see or measure Earth's core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains.

It can be known that NASA selected Psyche in 2017 to investigate a previously unexplored metal-rich asteroid of the same name. It is part of the agency's Discovery Program, a line of low-cost, competitive missions led by a single principal investigator.

NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, testing high-data-rate laser communications, is integrated into the Psyche spacecraft and will continue as planned on the new launch date, the research agency said.