Artist rendition of the asteroid Psyche. Credit: Image by Peter Rubin/ASU
Psyche to offer unique look into violent collisions that created Earth, terrestrial planets. Arizona State University’s Psyche Mission, a journey to a metal asteroid, has been selected for flight, marking the first time the school will lead a deep-space NASA mission and the first time scientists will be able to see what is believed to be a planetary core. It will launch in 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, where it will spend 20 months in orbit, mapping it and studying its properties.
It will be part of NASA’s Discovery Program, a series of lower-cost, highly focused robotic space missions that are exploring the solar system. The Psyche project is capped at $450 million. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) said: “Having the Psyche Mission selected for NASA’s Discovery Program will help us gain insights into the metal interior of all rocky planets in our solar system, including Earth.”
Psyche, an asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, is made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal. As such, it offers a unique look into the violent collisions that created Earth and the other terrestrial planets. The scientific goals of the Psyche mission are to understand the building blocks of planet formation and explore firsthand a wholly new and unexplored type of world. The mission team seeks to determine whether Psyche is a protoplanetary core, how old it is, whether it formed in similar ways to Earth’s core, and what its surface is like.
NASA / ASU SESE mission to the Psyche asteroid from ASU Now on Vimeo.
Every world explored so far by humans (except gas giant planets such as Jupiter or Saturn) has a surface of ice or rock or a mixture of the two, but their cores are thought to be metallic. These cores, however, lie far below rocky mantles and crusts and are considered unreachable in our lifetimes. Psyche, an asteroid that appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of a protoplanet, one of the building blocks of the sun’s planetary system, may provide a window into those cores. The asteroid is most likely a survivor of violent space collisions, common when the solar system was forming.
Psyche follows an orbit in the outer part of the main asteroid belt, at an average distance from the sun of 280 million miles, or 3 times farther from the sun than Earth. It is roughly the size of Massachusetts (~130 miles in diameter) and dense (7,000 kg/m³).
The spacecraft’s instrument payload will include magnetometers, multispectral imagers, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and a radio-science experiment. The multispectral imager, which will be led by an ASU science team, will provide high-resolution images using filters to discriminate between Psyche’s metallic and silicate constituents. It consists of a pair of identical cameras designed to acquire geologic, compositional and topographic data.
The gamma ray and neutron spectrometer will detect, measure and map Psyche’s elemental composition. The instrument is mounted on a 7-foot boom to distance the sensors from background radiation created by energetic particles interacting with the spacecraft and to provide an unobstructed field of view. The science team for this instrument is based at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
The magnetometer, led by scientists at MIT and UCLA, is designed to detect and measure the remnant magnetic field of the asteroid. It’s composed of two identical high-sensitivity magnetic field sensors located at the middle and outer end of the boom. The Psyche spacecraft will also use an X-band radio telecommunications system, led by scientists at MIT and NASA’s JPL. This instrument will measure Psyche’s gravity field and, when combined with topography derived from onboard imagery, will provide information on the interior structure of the asteroid.
https://asunow.asu.edu/20170104-discoveries-asu-lead-nasa-space-exploration-mission-1st-time
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