NASA’s Psyche Mission Media Reel

B-roll for media. NASA's Psyche mission, scheduled to launch in October 2023, is the first to a metal-rich asteroid (also named Psyche). This reel includes animations of the Psyche spacecraft and asteroid, and footage of engineers in clean rooms at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and near the launch site at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The team is assembling the spacecraft and integrating several key components, including the thrusters, the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and the magnetometer. The b-roll also shows the installation of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, an independent technology demonstration that will fly on the spacecraft to test high-data-rate laser communications that could be used by future NASA missions. (It is not intended to transmit Psyche data.) The reel also includes soundbites from Psyche's principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Scientists think the Psyche asteroid may consist of a significant amount of metal from the core of a planetesimal, one of the building blocks of the rocky planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. If so, it could provide a unique opportunity to study how planets like Earth formed. Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin to orbit the asteroid Psyche in 2029.

What is said in the film

16 Psyche is an asteroid that orbits the sun out between Mars and Jupiter. It's called 16 Psyche because it was the 16th asteroid discovered and they were all being named after gods and goddesses at that time. All the rocky planets that we know of the Earth, Mercury, Mercury, Venus, Mars and the Moon all have got a metal core in their center. And especially for the earth, it's the source of our magnetic field, which may be tied to holding onto our atmosphere and making our planet habitable. There's a lot of study that's going on to understand that, but we don't know a lot about our core.

What we've learned about it. We learn indirectly because we can't go there. And so psyche gives us the opportunity to visit a core the only way that humankind can ever do. And so we hope to learn something about what's inside the earth and other rocky planets by visiting Psyche. But it also tells us about the processes in the in the very beginning of the solar system.

It helps us understand how planets form in the first place. I did get to look at Psyche through an optical telescope in my backyard. Some wonderful colleagues brought over their telescope and very, very tiny faint dot on a fortuitous night. And that made a bunch of us cry to think that we could send something to investigate that speck of light was mind blowing. I think no matter what we think it is right now and how much we hypothesize what it might look like.

I think it's going to really surprise us and change our views about our solar system when we get there. And that's a it's an incredible opportunity to be a part of the team making that happen. It's astonishing to work on a project where we actually have to make succession plans because a lot of us are going to be retiring while we're still going. And that is a fact of deep space exploration that I think actually pushes us to be better humans and better team members because you can't just be the solo hero. You got to be ready for your project to keep going successfully with people other than yourself.

We have computer created generalized shape models, but we really don't know what it looks lik And so I've been dreaming about this object now for over a decade, and by then it'll be two decades. The whole point of going to space is to show humanity how we can do better here on Earth.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/JPL-20230809-PSYCHEf-0001-Psyche Media Reel Chronological). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.