Psyche Gamma-Ray Instrument Hums to Life, Marking Next Generation for Space Exploration
By Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Set 6.5 feet (2 meters) away from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on the tip of a boom, the mission’s gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) hummed to life on Nov. 6 for the first time since launch in mid-October. The GRS is one half of the Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (GRNS) instrument on the Psyche mission. A subset of the GRS instrument team, consisting of John Goldsten, Patrick Peplowski, Morgan Burks and David Lawrence, watched in awe at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mission operations center in California as “beautiful data” poured down every five seconds from the spacecraft.