Psyche Mission or Psyche Spacecraft
NASA is building an electric spacecraft to reach the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is focussed on Psyche asteroid . Therefore the spacecraft got the name " Psyche spacecraft". The solar electric propulsion-based Psyche spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in 2026.
About the Psyche mission :
The Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal 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.
The mission is led by Arizona State University. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is responsible for mission management, operations and navigation. The spacecraft's solar-electric propulsion chassis will be built by Maxar (formerly SSL) with a payload that includes an imager, magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer.
Science Goals of this mission :
- Understand a previously unexplored building block of planet formation: iron cores.
- Look inside terrestrial planets, including Earth, by directly examining the interior of a differentiated body, which otherwise could not be seen.
- Explore a new type of world. For the first time, examine a world made not of rock and ice, but metal.
Science Objectives of this mission :
- Determine whether Psyche is a core, or if it is unmelted material.
- Determine the relative ages of regions of Psyche's surface.
- Determine whether small metal bodies incorporate the same light elements as are expected in the Earth's high-pressure core.
- Determine whether Psyche was formed under conditions more oxidizing or more reducing than Earth's core.
- Characterize Psyche's topography.
