The NASA Psyche Mission: An Electric Journey to a Metallic World
presented by
Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Foundation and Regents Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
When our solar system was just an infant, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in fewer than one million years. Many melted, allowing metal cores to differentiate from rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may still exist, revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. I’ll discuss what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid, how we have planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this unknown object, how we progressed with the mission through COVID, with its intense challenges to teams, and an update of where we are one year post-launch.
More information and registration: https://science.carleton.ca/events/herzberg-lecture/