TEMPE, Ariz. - A Tempe woman could not believe it when she got the phone call.
NASA was on the other end of the line. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist with the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, learned she would be leading a deep-space mission–the Psyche Mission.
Her objective is to send a robotic probe to a metal asteroid called Psyche.
“It’s the first metal world that humans have ever visited,” Elkins-Tanton said. “We’ve gone to rocky worlds like the moon and Mars, and we’ve one to gas giants like Jupiter and icy worlds. But there’s only one large—fairly large—metal world in our solar system.”
Elkins-Tanton’s mission began seven years ago, when she submitted a 250-page proposal to NASA.
Hers and four other proposals were selected, meaning Elkins-Tanton had to come up with an even more meticulous report of 1,500 pages and then present her project to NASA.
“How to build it, how to build the spacecraft, how to do the measurements, what to do with the data, what the trajectory would be with space, what kind of orbits we expect to see and learn, everyone that would be needed to staff it and the budget …” she said, describing the components of the plan she developed.
Elkins-Tanton is the second woman in the world to be picked to lead a deep-space mission.
The plan is to launch in August of 2022.
“We will fly through space for 3.4 years out to Psyche, and then we will orbit Psyche for 21 months, and that will happen in 2026,” Elkins-Tanton said.