Psyche Flight Systems Engineer Christina Hernandez – Behind the Spacecraft
Meet Christina Hernandez, a flight systems engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video Hernandez, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about getting Psyche ready for launch through the spacecraft’s verification-and-validation phase and her passion for heavy metal music.
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 first 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.
Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Learn all about our first-of-its-kind #MissionToPsyche 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.
I was a kid that was actually never a tinkerer.
I was a reader.
I loved exploring through science fiction.
Once I figured out that engineering is what enables science fiction to become a reality, that's what really pushed me into this career path.
My name is Christina Hernandez, and I'm making sure that we built a spacecraft that's ready to explore a metal world.
What's really exciting about Psyche being a metal-rich asteroid is we haven't yet had the opportunity to explore a planetary core.
And that's what we actually think happened to Psyche, is that it could have been the remnant of a planetary collision billions of years ago in our solar system.
All that's left is the metal-rich remnant.
So Psyche's science objectives are really cool.
We have a couple of instruments. So we have a magnetometer that's going to look for evidence of a magnetic field.
We also have an imager.
Images aren't just cool, but they also provide context for the topography of the asteroid and that gives us an understanding of the history behind the asteroid.
My job is to help guide the team through the testing, so the verification and validation of our vehicle.
We are hunting for flight software bugs.
We are putting our hardware to the test at extreme temperatures, extreme conditions.
We need to be able to convince ourselves as engineers that this vehicle is going to be able to maintain its science objectives.
Psyche's actually a really cool mission and it's actually a mission to a metal world.
And I am a huge heavy metal fan.
I get the sense of calmness from listening to the heaviness of the music, and it actually enables me to have clarity in trying to figure out a path forward for whatever issue we're trying to solve.
So being able to kind of bring in that aspect of my life with science — so heavy metal, going to a metal world — that's pretty cool.
NASA. A NASA 360 production.