DTU Ørsted Lecture - The NASA Psyche Mission: An Electric Journey to a Metallic World

Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton
Foundation and Regents Professor, Arizona State University

Principal Investigator, NASA Psyche Mission

When our solar system was just an infant, thousands of planetesimals 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 Psyche. This lecture will introduce what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid Psyche, how we have planned a mission and built a spacecraft, in partnership with DTU, to study this unknown object, how we progressed with the mission through COVID, and the building excitement now that we are just over three months to launch!

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist, the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative. Her research concerns the formation and evolution of rocky planets. She has led four field expeditions in Siberia. Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. In 2021 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.

[toonmoene]

"We just need one more person on this team" - they didn't read "The Mythical Man Month" ? "Adding people to a late project makes it later" ...