Psyche Electrical Engineer Luis Dominguez – Behind the Spacecraft
Meet Luis Dominguez, an engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Dominguez, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the JPL clean room where he and the assembly, test, and launch operations team are putting together and testing the spacecraft. He also talks about his passion for outreach and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers.
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.
This is the final episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission. Join us on this channel on Sept. 20 for a livestreamed Q&A with Dominguez.
Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Learn about this first-of-its-kind mission at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche.
Credit: NASA
Produced by: NASA 360 Productions
Transcript
Behind The Spacecraft: Psyche — Journey to a Metal World.
At the end of the day, it’s always a philosophical question, right?
Of, why are we in this universe?
And understanding how this universe works is kind of those first steps.
My name is Luis Dominguez, and my job is to assemble all the different components for the Psyche spacecraft that is going to go investigate a metal-rich asteroid.
We’re going to go investigate the largest metallic asteroid that’s out there.
The more we understand that, we think that could give us a lot more insights on what our actual planet is doing.
And welcome to High Bay 2 at JPL.
This is the Psyche spacecraft.
And so this is where we control the Psyche spacecraft, dictate how things happen on the floor in the high bay, and make sure that the spacecraft is safe.
My team’s job is to assemble the flight vehicle.
We pull together all the different components that everyone’s building, bring it together, make sure it works.
We bombard the spacecraft with as many tests as we can to make sure that the flight software is as rugged and the hardware is as rugged as it needs to be to get those requirements accomplished.
And then throw it on top of a rocket and launch it.
It’s amazing.
I mean, growing up where I grew up, I never thought I would be working on anything like this.
Never thought I’d be capable of doing something like this.
So that’s one of the biggest things that kind of drives me.
I like to do a lot of outreach and go out and talk to kids, especially from like socioeconomically disenfranchised areas. Because I get them.
And I always tell them, you know, live your life with courage, curiosity, tenacity, and a healthy dose of altruism.
Seeing their, like, eyes shine up, it's just truly awesome.
NASA. A NASA 360 production.