NASA Delays Psyche Asteroid Mission
NASA's Psyche mission—its first designed to study a metal-rich asteroid—will not make its planned 2022 launch attempt.
Late delivery of the spacecraft's flight software and testing equipment means the agency doesn't have enough time left to complete assessments before the year's launch period ends on Oct. 11. "The mission team needs more time to ensure that the software will function properly in flight," NASA said in a news release(Opens in a new window).
Five years in the making, Psyche(Opens in a new window) was selected in 2017 as part of the Discovery Program, aimed at providing flight opportunities for low-cost, high-quality planetary science investigations. The spacecraft's eventual 280-million-mile voyage to its namesake asteroid will ditch traditional rocket fuel in favor of a gradual buildup of speed using ion propulsion.
Psyche is expected to swing past Mars for a gravitational push during its 3.5-year cruise to the asteroid, where it will spend 21 months measuring, mapping, and testing laser communication (which can potentially transmit more data to Earth in a given amount of time). But it's not going anywhere yet. Following the discovery of a compatibility issue with the software's testbed simulators, NASA shifted the mission's targeted launch date from Aug. 1 to Sept. 20 or later. The flaws have been found and fixed, but not quickly enough for a launch this year.
"Flying to a distant metal-rich asteroid, using Mars for a gravity assist on the way there, takes incredible precision. We must get it right," Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Laurie Leshin said. "Hundreds of people have put remarkable effort into Psyche during this pandemic, and the work will continue as the complex flight software is thoroughly
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