Management

Bill Nelson is the agency administrator at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Psyche mission is sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, where Nicola Fox is the associate administrator and Lori Glaze is the director of the Planetary Science Division. Bill Knopf is the Psyche program executive. Sarah Noble is the program scientist.

Arizona State University in Tempe leads the Psyche mission and is the home to the mission’s principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton. The mission’s deputy principal investigator is Ben Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and testing, and operations. At JPL, the project manager is Henry Stone, the deputy project manager is Robert Mase, and the project scientist is Carol Polanskey.

The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration is sponsored by the Technology Demonstration Missions (TDM) program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program within the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD). Prasun Desai is the acting associate administrator of STMD. Kenneth Bowersox is the associate administrator for SOMD. Trudy Kortes is the director of TDM. Jason Mitchell is the program executive of SCaN. Joel Robinson is the DSOC mission manager.

JPL manages the DSOC project for NASA. JPL’s William “Bill” Klipstein is DSOC’s project manager, and Abhijit “Abi” Biswas is the project technologist.

NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for management of the launch service. For Psyche, Tim Dunn is the launch director, and Serkan Bastug is the mission manager.

For more details on Psyche team members, visit the Psyche mission team page.