NASA Announces Launch Delay for Psyche Asteroid Mission

Subject: Science and technology

Section: Space

Psyche asteroid mission

Psyche is a planned orbiter mission that will explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid of the same name under NASA’s Discovery Program.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will manage the project.
The Psyche spacecraft is designed with solar electric propulsion, and the scientific payload includes a multispectral imager, a magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer.
16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid, and was once thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.
Scientists think that 16 Psyche could be the exposed core of an early planet that could have been as large as Mars and lost its surface in a series of violent collisions.
The Psyche mission aims to characterize 16 Psyche’s geology, shape, elemental composition, magnetic field, and mass distribution.
It is expected that this mission will increase the understanding of planetary formation and interiors.

Science goals for the mission are:

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, made of metal.

The science objectives are:

Determine whether 16 Psyche is a core, or if it is unmelted material.
Determine the relative ages of regions of 16 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 16 Psyche was formed under conditions more oxidizing or more reducing than Earth’s core.
Characterize 16 Psyche’s topography.