Title: "The NASA Psyche Mission: First Visit to an Unknown World"
Abstract: 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 form inside 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 more than 1-year post-launch.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and professor at Arizona State University. She was previously Director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. Elkins-Tanton’s research is on the physical and chemical growth and evolution of rocky planets and on volcanic activity and extinctions on Earth, as well as on effective teams and future-facing educational practices. Elkins-Tanton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as well as the mineral elkinstantonite. Elkins-Tanton received a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from MIT.
