9 months into a 6-year journey to a far-flung asteroid, NASA’s Psyche mission cruising along

These days, Lindy Elkins-Tanton is living out a Talking Heads song lyric: She’s keeping her feet on the ground and her head in the sky.

Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Arizona State University-led NASA Psyche mission, is carefully monitoring the Psyche spacecraft as it cruises 2.2 billion miles toward an asteroid by the same name with an expected arrival date of August 2029. The team has hypothesized that the metal-rich asteroid is core material of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet. Studying it may give us insight into how Earth and the other terrestrial planets formed.

While she’s keeping tabs on the spacecraft, Elkins-Tanton is also enthused about a new eight-hour online course she helped develop called “Countless Worlds in our Solar System: Asteroids, Comets and Meteorites.”

The class, hosted by ASU’s Career Catalyst, will examine the small objects that provide insight into the formation of the solar system. It will also answer several questions, such as:

• What are the differences between asteroids, comets and meteorites?
• What events in history have asteroids, comets and meteorites played a role in?
• What kind of jobs can one get studying celestial objects?