With just 76-days left until NASA’s Psyche Mission launches on October 5th, engineers and technicians at Cape Canaveral are busy making the final preparations on the spacecraft ahead of liftoff. The orbiter is set to travel 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) to a metal-rich asteroid worth $10-quadrillion that may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form.
Asteroid Psyche measures approximately 173-miles at its widest point and its metal-rich body could have been a part of the building block of an early planet. After reaching Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the spacecraft will spend at least 26 months orbiting the asteroid, gathering images and other data about its composition.
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The team and I are now counting down the days to launch. Our focus has shifted to safely completing the final mechanical closeout of the spacecraft and preparing the team for operations. The team is conducting numerous training activities to ensure that we are prepared and ready,” said Henry Stone, Psyche’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
