The spacecraft is targeting an Oct. 12 liftoff atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. Its destination, a metal-rich asteroid, may tell us more about how planets form.
spacecraft is slated to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With its sights set on a mysterious asteroid of the same name, Psyche is NASA’s first scientific mission to be launched on a
“The team has worked tirelessly to prepare the spacecraft for its journey to a one-of-a-kind asteroid,” said Henry Stone, Psyche’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “All spacecraft systems, science instruments, and software have been integrated and extensively tested, and the spacecraft is fully configured for flight.
Once the rocket is out of Earth’s atmosphere, about four minutes after launch, the fairing will separate from its ride and split into two halves, which are jettisoned back to Earth. The spacecraft will then separate from the upper stage about an hour after launch. Soon after, it will deploy its twin solar arrays, one at a time, and direct them at the Sun.
After the spacecraft reaches the asteroid in 2029, it will spend about 26 months in orbit, gathering images and other data.
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