Additive Manufacturing with Hypothesized Surface Materials – VCU – A
INSTITUTION
Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU)
CLASS
Iridium Class (2024 – 2025)
STUDENT TEAM
ACADEMIC GUIDANCE
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The NASA Psyche mission is an orbiter mission to the metal-rich asteroid, Psyche, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, which launched in October 2023 and will arrive at the asteroid in mid-2029, will study the asteroid from orbit and will not land on the surface. However, it is possible to imagine that, given its surface materials that are hypothesized to be a mix of rock and metals, scientists and engineers may be interested in proposing a return mission to land on its surface. As technology advances and humans send robotic missions to conduct more activities in space, it will be increasingly important to utilize the resources found on solar system mission targets, and this may particularly be the case of an asteroid with Psyche’s characteristics. Using Psyche’s known and hypothesized environmental and surface conditions, which have been laid out in recent scientific reports (and keeping in mind other constraints such as its gravity, length of day and year, rotation, surface temperature, etc.), the team will investigate the potential of the Psyche asteroid to support in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) specifically to make refined metals, such as iron and aluminum, as well as other materials such as silicon, to enable vapor deposition systems to additively build structures in the low-gravity environment of Psyche, taking into account prior concepts for similar activities on the Moon or Mars as well as analogs on Earth.