Bound for SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, NASA’s probe Psyche arrives at Kennedy
SpaceX has only launched its Falcon Heavy three times, but it has two more possible missions for it slated this summer. One of them, NASA’s Pscyhe probe headed for an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, has arrived at Kennedy Space Center.
The Falcon Heavy, which is basically three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, is one of the most powerful rockets ever built, producing more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. It’s the most powerful operational rocket active, although both the Artemis I mission using the Space Launch System and SpaceX’s in-the-works Starship with Super Heavy rockets will exceed that.
For now, though, Falcon Heavy has the crown, more than doubling the thrust of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy.
It first flew on a test in 2018 with the notable payload of Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster, which is currently in an orbit near Mars. The launch was a media spectacle, and two operational launches since have drawn crowds to the Space Coast, but the last launches were nearly three years ago.
Falcon Heavy has a planned launch for the Space Force, USSF 44, with top secret payloads that could fly this summer as well, but has been delayed since 2021.
What is on the calendar is the Psyche mission. The hardware arrived to KSC’s Launch and Landing Facility on Friday, and it is targeting an Aug. 1 liftoff from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A.
The probe is headed for a metalrich asteroid Pysche, which orbits the sun beyond Mars anywhere from 235 million to 309 million miles away. That’s 2.5 to 3 times farther away from the sun that Earth is.
The mission, which is being run Arizona State University will be managed out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Scientists are interested in the potato-shaped celestial body, albeit with an average diameter of 140 miles, or roughly the size of Daytona Beach to Tampa along Interstate 4, because of its nickel-iron core.
Metallic cores are what scientists believe is at the center of rocky planets including Earth, so Psyche they hypothesize is representative of one of the building blocks of the solar system.
“Because we cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets,” reads a mission overview for the mission.
The probe will have an imager, magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer among instruments to be used to examine a world not made of rock and ice, but metal, for the first time.
“If it turns out to be part of a metal core, it would be part of the very first generation of early cores in our solar system,” said Arizona State University’s Lindy Elkins-Tanton in a NASA press release. “But we don’t really know, and we won’t know
anything for sure until we get there. We wanted to ask primary questions about the material that built planets. We’re filled with questions and not a lot of answers. This is real exploration.”
The asteroid was first discovered on March 17, 1852, by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, named for the Greek goddess of the soul who in mythology was born human, but married the Greek god of love Eros, aka Cupid.
NASA looks to hit its target of launching Psyche this year, send it on its way toward Mars by 2023 where it will get a gravity assist, and then arrive in 2026.
It will then spend 21 months in orbit mapping the asteroid’s properties.
Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program, which also sent the Lucy probe from the Space Coast last fall on its way to asteroids that orbit the sun in front of and behind Jupiter. Other Discovery mission have included Mars Pathfinder, Kepler space telescope and the Lunar Prospector.
“Humans have always been explorers,” Elkins-Tanton said. “We’ve always set out from where we are to find out what is over that hill. We always want to go farther; we always want to imagine . ... We don’t know what we’re going to find, and I’m expecting us to be entirely surprised.”