NASA’s mission to a metal-rich asteroid is back on track after a minor setback. Psyche is now all set to launch on October 12.
A week before the original scheduled launch, engineers discovered an issue with the Psyche spacecraft’s thrusters that could have caused it to overheat during its eight-year mission. As a result, NASA decided to delay the launch of the mission by a week as teams worked to resolve the issue.
Luckily, it was an easy fix. During a presentation at the Sands Space History Center on Saturday, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the Psyche mission, revealed that the spacecraft is ready for launch following a simple update to its flight computer, CBS News reported. Rather than risking the thrusters overheating, the spacecraft will now fire its thrusters at a lower power level. That means that the spacecraft will take longer to pull off its maneuvers in space, but that won’t affect the overall mission, according to Elkins-Tanton.
“Thank God, we’ve got this great team and that we found (this problem),” Elkins-Tanton is quoted as saying in CBS News. “And so I have … total gratitude that they found this before we launched. And it was just fortuitous. It’s a good story.”
The spacecraft should arrive at the asteroid—also called Psyche—in August 2029, using a Mars gravity assist in 2026 to send it on a trajectory toward the asteroid’s orbit. As NASA describes it, this asteroid is so tantalizing because it “appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system.” NASA is currently reaping the scientific rewards of another asteroid endeavor: the OSIRIS-Rex mission to Bennu, which has produced a lot more asteroid samples than the team hoped for.
Psyche has 12 thrusters that are used to control the spacecraft’s momentum and orientation. If the issue hadn’t been discovered during final pre-launch preparations for the mission, it may have damaged the spacecraft.
Additionally, if the mission team had not been able to quickly resolve the thruster issue, then the spacecraft might have missed its launch window. The mission has launch opportunities every day between October 12 and 25, but after that, it would need to wait a full year to try again. That would’ve been another unfortunate delay for the Psyche mission, which has already missed its launch window once before.
The Psyche mission was originally meant to launch in 2022, but NASA delayed it due to issues with the spacecraft’s flight software and testing equipment that could not be resolved in time. The flight software controls the spacecraft’s orientation and trajectory, as well as its ability to send and receive data to Earth. In October 2022, NASA announced that Psyche was back on track for launch after an internal review that looked into staffing and communication issues that contributed to its delay.
Psyche is now scheduled to lift off on October 12 at 10:16 a.m. ET. We’ll share the live streams when they become available.