With less than a month separating us from a key aspect of review approval, released data on the NASA’s “16 Psyche” mission is becoming clearer. The expedition’s goal is to get close to an asteroid named 16 Psyche in our local main asteroid belt, which, because of the metal it holds, is worth approximately $100,000 quadrillion USD. Similar to the mission’s signature, the spacecraft’s name is “The Psyche”. The capsule was inspected in a five-day evaluation by Maxar Technologies, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, being a basic design review, later confirmed that the craft’s design fulfills agency’s demands for the mission.
This assignment will be a huge partnership between NASA’s JPL, Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, as well as Maxar Technologies. Those involved in the mission will study the asteroid’s structure as well as its incredibly valuable metal.
However, the missions’ goal isn’t to extract the asteroid’s valuable metals but to conclude the probability that 16 Psyche is the heart of a planet-sized object, for the former hypothesis was that the asteroid was the center of a planet the size of Mars.
The theoretical work for this expedition started back in 2016, and introductory designs were revealed through the year 2017 and into 2019. The Final Design is next and then Subsystem Fabrication, Assembly, and the Test Phase stage. It is anticipated that Instrument and Spacecraft Assembly and Test will begin in early 2021.
The Psyche capsule is due to be sent to its launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida in the earlier half of the year 2020, and the mission’s official launch is expected to happen in August of 2020.
The expedition is in its final design and fabrication stages at the moment, and more news will be revealed sometime in May, the year 2019.
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