to launch

For the first time ever, we are
exploring a world made not of rock or ice,
but of metal.

Image of the psyche spacecraft. Shows the plus shaped panels attached to the

Mission to a
Metal World

Deep within the terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets’ rocky mantles and crusts. The asteroid Psyche offers a unique window into these building blocks of planet formation and the opportunity to investigate a previously unexplored type of world.

About Psyche Mission

Click through the 3D virtual gallery created in artsteps to explore each of the gallery rooms and view artworks from this year’s class of Psyche Inspired interns. The map icon on the bottom...

The Psyche Inspired Art Gallery app is a clickable gallery that will let you explore the art pieces created by our Psyche Inspired interns from across the nation as well as read more about each...

This image shows a Maxar technician in a lab coat working on part of the Psyche spacecraft.

On April 15, 2020, Maxar Technologies completed an important milestone in building Psyche, a spacecraft that will launch in 2022 to explore a metallic asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and...

Image of the Science Data Center, located at Arizona State University.

NASA space missions like Psyche collect data (images, spectra, etc) and send the data back to Earth, but what then? That’s where my job comes in as the Manager of the Psyche Science Data Center...

A configuration diagram drawn on a whiteboard.

The very first meeting I went to in my first job out of school was a “configuration meeting” (an engineering design meeting) for a huge telecommunications satellite called Multi-Media Asia....

This artist's conception shows the Psyche spacecraft against a starry background orbiting above the heavily cratered surface of the Psyche asteroid.

NASA has selected SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the agency’s Psyche mission.

Where Are We Now?

A space mission typically has six phases, A-F. The Psyche Mission is currently in “Phase C,” which lasts until January 2021. In this phase, the mission is focused on final design and subsystem fabrication, assembly, and testing.

Experience the Timeline