How Will #MissionToPsyche See Its Target Asteroid?
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will use highly sensitive cameras to allow scientists to see a metal-rich asteroid that’s never been imaged up close before.
Planetary scientist and Psyche mission co-investigator Jim Bell of Arizona State University, along with his instrument team, developed this critical technology in collaboration with Main Space Science Systems.
Psyche’s multispectral imager consists of a pair of identical cameras with filters and telescopic lenses that will photograph the surface of the asteroid in different wavelengths of light. It will provide the data needed to build a digital terrain model of the asteroid’s surface, contribute to revealing Psyche’s geochemistry and composition, and help with navigation.
Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.
Psyche is expected to launch in October 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Learn about this first-of-its-kind mission at: https://www.nasa.gov/psyche/.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Produced by: True Story Films
Transcript
I remember two Voyager missions launched in 1977.
Shortly after launch, they turned around.
They got the earth and the moon in the same picture.
I've just been fascinated with imaging from deep space missions ever since, and I've been very fortunate to be able to create some of those pictures.
Psyche is what’s called an M-class asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
It's the 16th asteroid discovered back in the 19th century.
And we think that maybe it's the remnants of a planetary core.
All of the missions I've worked on had some sort of an imaging device.
Isn't that the first question that everyone asks?
What does it look like?
And so I've been dreaming about this object now for over a decade.
And by then it'll be two decades I’ve been dreaming about this object, and then to see what it really looks like.
What's more exciting than that?
For Psyche, we know it's going to be a relatively dark object.
So we have to have an instrument that can see in that sensitivity with the dark surface and still be able to resolve the features that we're looking at.
The cameras on Psyche, we call them the Psyche multispectral imagers.
They're a pair of identical cameras.
They're a pair for redundancy just in case we have a problem with one, we've got the other one.
And with stereo, we can build what's called a digital terrain model, the surface of Psyche, which we're very interested in knowing at a high resolution.
Using the different filters, we actually can infer geochemistry of the surface.
We can also associate it with the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer data set to sort of really drilll down into the composition of the asteroid.
We'll also take pictures farther out into the infrared, where the sensors are still sensitive and where we can get a little bit more information about the kinds of rocks and minerals on the surface.
One of the other functions besides science for the cameras is that they are our navigation cameras as well.
This technique that was invented back in the 70’s called optical navigation, take pictures of stars and star fields, kind of like looking at a sextant on a ship hundreds of years ago.
That same process is used in modern space missions as well.
The instruments actually being built by a company called Malin Space Science Systems.
They built the LRO camera.
They built MASTCAM, they built MASTCAM-Z.
They've built numerous other cameras that are flown to Mars, and they do the final fabrication quality control before then delivering that instrument to JPL.
No deep space camera system like this has ever been built.
However, the components that go into the cameras all have a lot of experience in space.
A lot of what NASA calls heritage.
When we get to Psyche we’ll go into orbit.
The imager will primarily work during Orbits A and B to get the images to characterize the surface features, to make the topographic map, and to get the color images which will hint at the composition.
Standard plan is that we’re pointed straight down and we’re snapping pictures as the asteroid rotates underneath them.
Usually the most important image that everybody gets excited is that first image that we acquire that you get back.
We are super committed on the Psyche project from P.I. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, and all the way down to sharing this experience with the public.
I think the only thing we know and that's, you know, based on, you know, NASA's 50-60 year experience now is it is not gonna look like what we think it's gonna look like.
And it's going to be really interesting whatever we find.