Psyche Power Electronics Engineer Meena Sreekantamurthy – Behind the Spacecraft

Meet Meena Sreekantamurthy, a power electronics engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Sreekantamurthy, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, explains how power is critical for gathering the mission’s science data. She also talks about her passion for painting and drawing. Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.  This is the second episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission. Join us on this channel on Sept. 13 and 20 for livestreamed Q&As with team members as well. Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029. Learn all about our first-of-its-kind #MissionToPsyche at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche Credit: NASA Produced by: NASA 360 Productions

What is said in the film

Behind The Spacecraft: Psyche — Journey to a Metal World. Just look at the evolution of mankind. We depend so much on power in our day-to-day lives. If power stops, everything stops around our world. That's very motivating for me.

My name is Meena Sreekantamurthy and I help power the science on the Psyche spacecraft. Psyche is a big, metal asteroid. Scientists hypothesize that by studying this asteroid, it can give us hints as to how our planet Earth formed. I worked on the power supply unit. And this is my workstation.

This is where I worked on the low voltage power supply for the Psyche mission. This is like the brains of the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, which collects science information. It will determine what are the different types of elements that are on this asteroid. None of this could have been made possible without the diversity of skill sets that each one of us in our community brought to the team. It was your inspiration, your passion, your endeavor.

Power engineers, they’re a little bit scarce. Our skill sets can be used wherever is needed. For example, power is a very critical part of the mission. If the power doesn't turn on, then you can't get any science data back. So it's very critical.

One of my hobbies is painting and drawing. You might think, huh, an engineer and art? Putting my paint brush to the canvas helps me bring out some of that innovation for engineering. It's not very common that you might find a job where you have to go to a metal-rich world. That's very fascinating and very motivating.

It's pretty exciting to watch something that we built with our own hands. To see that launch in a couple of years, reach Psyche and send back science data. We have come so far in the field of science and technology that now we are ejecting ourselves out of this world. To be part of that kind of mission and make this kind of impact to society is what inspires me to be an engineer in the space exploration sector. NASA.

A NASA 360 production.

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