How are habitable planets like the Earth built? How do we learn what they were built from, and when? We can learn about the rocky exteriors, but one fundamental mystery always remains: Do they have metal cores?
When our solar system was just an infant, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in fewer than one million years. Many melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may still exist, revealed in the asteroid Psyche. NASA’s Psyche mission has sent a robotic (uncrewed) spacecraft on a long journey through space to visit this asteroid, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. We are sending the probe there because this asteroid seems to be made from largely a metal core, and it has a partially metal surface. This will be the first metallic object humans have ever visited! It’s primary, it’s really far-out outer orbit exploration, and nearly now a visit with a new class of solar system objects.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Foundation and Regents Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, will discuss what we’ve learned and what we hope to learn about the asteroid, how we have planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this metallic object, and how we progressed with the mission through COVID, with its intense challenges to the Psyche mission teams. Now, two years after launch, the spacecraft is soon to receive gravity assist from Mars, and slingshot out further in the solar system to intersect with and go into orbit around Psyche by 2029.
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A list of future Theodore Talks can be found on the American Mensa National Events Calendar at: https://www.us.mensa.org/attend/calendar/, or by viewing the January issue of the Mensa Bulletin.
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Questions? Contact Brad Lucht at [email protected].
