(suspenseful music) (lively music) - [Ted] Science strives to learn more about the unexplored places of our planet.

One place with mysteries science hasn't been able to unlock is the Earth's core.

Perhaps until now, with answers coming not from going underground but from going to outer space.

- It's about keeping your eyes open to understand what you're actually seeing, and being ready to let go of what you used to think.

What's more exciting than that?

- [Ted] Overcoming tech challenges and a worldwide pandemic, these scientists and engineers have the Psyche spacecraft ready for launch.

- 2.2 billion mile journey to get ourselves to the Psyche asteroid.

- But as we've said so many times, space is hard and things can go wrong anytime.

There's definitely gonna be stress and hope and anxiety.

And then after the liftoff, I hope for the most astonishing sense of relief and thrill.

- It will travel to an asteroid, also called Psyche.

Experts think that asteroid may be made largely of metal, perhaps like what's at the center of our planet.

Now we'll show you how they're going to Psyche, how that journey may unlock secrets about our home world.

Hi, I'm Ted Simons.

We're doing something special, we're giving a lot of time to just one topic and it's a big one.

It'll be a first for space science, a mission that has its roots and its leadership right here in the state of Arizona and Arizona State University.

As we show you around, we want to acknowledge the help of the storytelling teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for many of the elements that you will see in this program.

It's with their help that we're able to get you so close to what's going on behind the scenes of this exciting mission.

(gentle music) - [Scientist] 16 Psyche is an asteroid that orbits the sun out between Mars and Jupiter.

- The reason that Psyche is unique is that it is metal-rich.

- It's believed that it may be a remnant core of an early planetesimal that was formed in the very very earliest parts of the formation of the solar system.

- And after this planet started forming and this metal core formed inside of that, it collided with other bodies that then stripped off the rocky mantle leaving this core in place.

- This is the part of planets that we can't sample directly today.

- It's too hot, the pressure's too high, our instruments would melt.

Can't drill a hole that deep in the Earth or other planets.

So how do we study the core of our planet?

- Psyche gives us the opportunity to visit a core the only way that humankind can ever do, and it would be the first metal object that humankind has ever visited.

(gentle music) - [Scientist] After launch, we cruised through interplanetary space for a number of years.

First, we fly by Mars for gravity assist that will slingshot us into the asteroid belt.

And then we're thrusting all the way from there to finally arriving at Psyche.

(gentle music continue) - We'll go into four orbits to collect the necessary measurements that we need from our three primary instruments.

So our payload consists of a couple of imagers, which are cameras that take pictures of Psyche; also a gamma-ray neutron spectrometer which allows us to measure the elemental composition of the surface of Psyche; and then a magnetometer which will allow us to detect any magnetic field that's left at Psyche.

- If Psyche still has some sort of remnant magnetic field, that probably tells us it really was a core, it's a strong indicator.

We also used the radio on the spacecraft as an instrument so we can map out the gravity and map out the interior structure that way.

(gentle music) - We're using a particular thruster technology, Hall effect thruster technology.

They operate five times more efficiently than normal rockets, so they use a lot less fuel and is what allows us to get into orbit around this asteroid.

- Solar electric propulsion has been around for quite a while and it has flown before but we are continuing to push the boundaries.

We're gonna have big 5-panel foldout solar panels that will provide the electricity for the thrusters which use as propellant, the noble gas, xenon.

- This will be the first time that Hall Effect thrusters have flown in deep space.

(gentle music) - [Scientist] Studying the evolution of a planetary body is a detective story.

- There's a magic too when you actually are on the launchpad and you say, "We're go for launch."

- And you feel like singing and dancing and you feel like throwing up at the same time.

- Let's go discover things about our solar system that we have no other way to do.

I think that it's fundamental to who we are and also who we should be.

It's an incredible opportunity to be a part of the team making that happen.

(lively music) - It's easy to understand the interest in going to the other planets in our solar system but why an asteroid and why this asteroid?

While asteroids aren't rare, they're not all the same and they have unique things that we can learn from.

Things we won't learn from going to Mars or Venus or the other planets.

- There are probably two million asteroids in our solar system.

So far, there are only nine of them that we know of that we think are made of metal.

Nothing is perfectly confirmed yet.

Of those nine, Psyche is the largest one.

And it's the only one that's pretty round, roundish, (chuckling) and so it's the only one that is probably gonna hold onto the signature of its origins.

So Psyche is a singular object in our whole solar system.

- It may be easier to get your head around the building blocks of asteroids by looking at meteorites, bits or chunks of asteroids and other planetary objects that have made it to Earth.

Rhonda Stroud is a Director of the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies inside Arizona State University.

She's not part of the NASA Psyche mission but we asked her to go inside the Lab to help explain some of the science.

- So we think Psyche is mostly made of metal.

We know it's the largest M-type asteroid in our solar system but we think it's also got some silicate in it.

So maybe a little bit of type S-asteroid on the surface.

The type S-asteroids are lower density because silicate minerals are less dense than metal.

If we take the same size bit of the S-type asteroid as the M-type asteroid, you can see just how much denser the metal asteroid is.

We know from the telescope measurements of Psyche that it's not a pure metal marble.

It has to have at least some cracks, some pores.

It could be all metal made up of little aggregates of stones like this but it also could be a mixture of stony meteorite implanted or impacted on the surface of a core like this.

- One of the most satisfying moments in arriving at the asteroid will be finally getting a clear view of what Psyche looks like.

It'll probably be eye-catching and views of the surface will be scientifically important.

(suspenseful music) - I remember two Voyager missions launched in 1977.

Shortly after launch, they turned around, they got the Earth and the moon in the same picture.

I've just been fascinated with imaging from deep space missions ever since.

And have been very fortunate to be able to create some of those pictures.

(suspenseful music continue) (lively music) Psyche is what's called an M-class asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It's the 16th asteroid discovered back in the 19th century and we think that maybe it's the remnants of a planetary core.

- All of the missions I've worked on had some sort of an imaging device.

- Isn't that the first question that everyone asks?

What does it look like?

And so I've been dreaming about this object now for over a decade, and by then, it'll be two decades I've been dreaming about this object.

And then to see what it really looks like, what's more exciting than that?

(lively music) - For Psyche, we know it's gonna be a relatively dark object so we have to have a instrument that can see in that sensitivity with the dark surface and still be able to resolve the features that we're looking at.

- The cameras on Psyche, we call them the Psyche multispectral imagers.

They're a pair of identical cameras, they're a pair for redundancy.

Just in case we have a problem with one, we've got the other one.

- And with stereo, we can build what's called a digital terrain model, the surface of Psyche, which we're very interested in knowing at a high resolution.

(exciting music) Using the different filters, we actually can infer geochemistry of the surface.

We can also associate it with the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer dataset to sort of really drill down into the composition of the asteroid.

- We'll also take pictures farther out into the infrared where these sensors are still sensitive and where we can get a little bit more information about the kinds of rocks and minerals on the surface.

One of the other functions besides science for the cameras is that they are our navigation cameras as well.

This technique that was invented back in the '70s called optical navigation, take pictures of stars and star fields, kinda like, you know, looking at a sextant on a ship hundreds of years ago.

The same process is used in modern space missions as well.

(exciting music continue) - The instruments are actually being built by a company called Malin Space Science Systems.

They built the LRO camera, they built Mastcam, they built Mastcam-Z, they built numerous other cameras that have flown to Mars.

And they do the final fabrication and quality control before then delivering that instrument to JPL.

(gentle music) - No deep space camera system like this has ever been built.

However, the components that go into the cameras all have a lot of experience in space, a lot of what NASA calls heritage.

- When we get to Psyche, we'll go into orbit.

The imager will primarily work during orbits A and B to get the images to characterize the surface features, to make the topographic map, and to get the color images which will hint at the composition.

- Standard plan is that we point it straight down and we're snapping pictures as the asteroid rotates underneath them.

- Usually the most important image that everybody gets excited is that first image that we acquire, that you get back.

- We are super committed on the Psyche project from PI, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, all the way down to sharing this experience with the public.

I think the only thing we know, and that's, you know, based on, you know, NASA's 50, 60 year experience now, is that it's not gonna look like what we think it's gonna look like.

And it's gonna be really interesting, whatever we find.

(suspenseful music) - So, what we see in those pictures from the imagers will be one part of discovering what the materials are that make up the asteroid.

They should also begin to tell us if Psyche is mostly just one solid lump or possibly a collection of looser materials that appear to us from Earth as one body.

- So what we have here are meteorites.

They're the Canyon Diablo meteorite, all separate stones of iron nickel metal.

These are fractions of the meteoroid that made the impact that made Meteor Crater.

So it's possible that Psyche is actually a rubble pile of stones very much like this that were created during the impact of asteroids in the asteroid belt itself.

That would explain the low density compared to a solid chunk of metal that we've measured from the ground-based measurements of the Psyche asteroid.

Another possibility is that Psyche is actually made up of metal plus silicates melted together from an impact there in the asteroid belt.

And we're not really gonna know the difference until we get the spacecraft up close to the asteroid itself and we can make detailed measurements of the asteroid surface and what's below.

- The whole Psyche mission is powered, not just by rocket propellants and technology, but by passions and personalities.

So as we tell the larger story, we want to introduce you to a few of them.

- My job is to help guide the teams through the testing, so the verification and validation of our vehicle.

We are hunting for flight software bugs, we are putting our hardware to the test at extreme temperatures, extreme conditions.

We need to be able to convince ourselves as engineers that this vehicle is going to be able to maintain its science objectives.

Psyche is actually a really cool mission and it's actually a mission to a metal world.

And I am a huge heavy metal fan.

I get the sense of calmness from listening to the heaviness of the music and it actually enables me to have clarity in trying to figure out a path forward, for whatever issue we're trying to solve.

So being able to kind of bring in that aspect of my life with science, so heavy metal, going to a metal world, that's pretty cool.

- As human beings, if we're not exploring then what are we doing?

Hi, I'm Ben Inouye, and I help to keep the lights on on the Psyche spacecraft.

The Psyche mission is seeking to understand some of the origins of our own planet, maybe even discover something completely new.

The Power team and I engineered, designed, built and tested the Psyche power distribution assembly.

This is what powers the spacecraft.

This is something we expect to be using on missions for a decade or more in the future.

Everything that makes the mission what it is, what makes the spacecraft smart, what allows us to investigate in Psyche.

I'm from Hawaii originally.

Grew up on the big island, in Hilo.

My background is marine engineering, so I spent time on ships and learned a lot of the history of exploration of the planet.

I like to tie that into the work I do now because we're still exploring.

It's a metal-rich asteroid that we're going to.

There is a theory that this metallic asteroid may be very closely related to the materials that made up the core of our own planet.

The reason I was drawn to JPL was my hobby in astrophotography, to be part of a team that was trying to go out there and check it out as well.

The photography and the work that I do are to help people understand and appreciate what is out there.

We formed a really, really critical team and it's really rewarding to see something that you've spent years on as part of a bigger system and a bigger mission.

- I worked on the power supply unit and this is my workstation!

This is where I worked on the low voltage power supply for the Psyche mission.

This is like the brains of the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer which collects science information.

It will determine what are the different types of elements that are on this asteroid.

None of this could have been made possible without the diversity of skillsets that each one of us in our community brought to the team.

It was your inspiration, your passion, your endeavor.

Power engineers, they're a little bit scarce.

Their skillsets can be used wherever is needed.

For example, power is a very critical part of the mission.

If the power doesn't turn on, then you can't get any science data back.

So it's very critical.

One of my hobbies is painting and drawing.

You might think, huh, an engineer and art.

Putting my paintbrush to the canvas helps me bring out some of that innovation for engineering.

It's pretty exciting to watch something that we built with our own hands, to see that launch, and in a couple of years, reach Psyche, and send back science data.

- No successful space mission has ever gone off without a hitch, some kind of setback or problem.

The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in 2022.

- This mission had the additional complication of having to build and assemble hardware in the most difficult times of the pandemic.

- So, we asked Principal Investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, what it took for her and the team to strive through those challenges.

- One of the biggest challenges we've had on this mission is building a spacecraft during a global pandemic.

It was a team of heroes, I can't tell you.

Someone recently said to me that a successful mission is dodging 1,000 bullets and an unsuccessful mission is dodging 999.

So I can't tell you how many bullets we've dodged, I mean the team has been unbelievable.

During that time of fear and risk and danger and illness, they kept marching.

And we had things that we need to fix but we found the problems and we marched toward solving them until they were solved.

And so now we've got two gorgeous imagers mounted on the spacecraft ready to go, perfectly focused.

And they're gonna do their jobs.

And I'm so grateful for the miracles that individual humans can create when they set their mind to it, even in the face of huge challenges.

Launching in October of 2023, Psyche is in a different place with respect to the Earth and the sun and Mars, where we need our gravity assist; it's also in a different place with respect to the Earth and Psyche.

And so it's a different trajectory.

And so had we launched in 2022, we would have been cruising for 3.4 years.

But launching this year, we're gonna be cruising for 5.8 years.

So it's a longer wait to get the science.

But here's the amazing thing about it.

The science in the end is actually gonna be better.

We have better illumination with the sun, we have a little better angle, there are some things that are a little different about it.

It's gonna actually help us learn more in the end.

It's a little bit of a silver lining.

- The Psyche mission is not a sample-return mission, that it isn't like a recent mission where NASA intentionally crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid.

For most of us who aren't scientists, the biggest anticipation will probably be around the pictures that could come from the spacecraft's two cameras.

- Well that is the moment, I think, we're all waiting for is, what does it look like?

The beauty is, we really believe that space exploration is for everyone.

And so we've worked together, Jim Bell and I and the whole team, to create a pipeline so that these images are gonna be released to the public on the internet within a half hour of our receiving them from the Deep Space Network.

So they're gonna come straight from the spacecraft, through the giant radio dishes and right into your home so that everybody on Earth can be looking at them at the same time and seeing this new object that humans have never seen.

Humans have never had a picture of the surface of a metal object.

And we think at least part of the surface is actually metal.

We don't know whether it's little tiny pieces or it's big flat planes or it's broken up by faults or it's, you know, risen up in mountains, big craters, we don't know.

We don't know any of that.

So a lot of it is just discovery of what the surface is gonna look like.

And then like on any planetary mission, you use the images of the surface to try to interpret the geology.

How was this thing made and what did it go through during its evolution?

And so it will, the imagers, will be working together with the other science instruments, all the data together to help us understand how was this formed and what happened to it?

(suspenseful music) - If you're just joining us, I'm Ted Simons.

We're doing something special with the program.

NASA is sending a spacecraft deep into our solar system and they're going after some challenging scientific questions.

Answers to those questions may tell us things about our Earth that we can't learn any other way.

The state of Arizona and scientists at Arizona State University are in leadership roles for the mission.

- This is a robotic space mission to go see an asteroid way out between Mars and Jupiter.

Psyche is both the name of the mission and it's the name of the asteroid.

Why would we go there?

Because we think this asteroid is mostly made of metal.

You know, humans have visited places made of rock and places made of gas and ice, but we've never visited this kind of body.

So it's primary exploration.

- The creativity surrounding the Psyche mission isn't limited to the scientists and engineers.

The designers of the mission have integrated a role for artists to get and stay involved in the energy of this space launch with a program called Psyche Inspired.

- I fight against the notion that art and science are somehow opposite ends of something.

They are just two ways we try to understand the world around us, like suites of techniques that overlap.

And so we have this beautiful art program where students from around the country can apply and then we pick 16 per year, any major, any kind of creative arts, any medium.

And then we fund them to create four original works of art during the year.

So now we have hundreds and hundreds of amazing works of art created by students over the years.

Oh my gosh, sonatas, marching band pieces, poetry, cooking, jewelry, chalk art, you name it and people have made it.

And it's so human and connecting and it captures all the emotions that we all feel about this.

And it energizes the scientists and engineers and it connects us all together.

And so that's another way that anyone could get involved.

Come and look at the art, and then create your own and send it in.

We have something called Psyche Space Crafty and we like to post what you make too.

- The SpaceX rocket that will launch Psyche is in position.

And as we draw closer to liftoff, Lindy Elkins-Tanton tells us why seeing the rocket clearing the launchpad will simply be the start of the long process of guiding the spacecraft to its final destination.

- So I hope it's gonna feel like the wedding's over and now we're at the reception, but, of course, you know then there's the 100-day checkout where we have to test everything on the spacecraft and make sure it all works.

The solar arrays have to deploy and all the power systems have to work and the thermal models have to be correct.

And so for 100 days, we're gonna have very intensive minute-by-minute testing of the whole spacecraft.

Then that'll be another finish line where we're gonna go, "Ah."

(laughing) - So this is what the spacecraft will look like in its flight configuration, after the solar arrays have been deployed and it's on its journey to Psyche and how it will be flown when it's orbiting.

The spacecraft you can see is clearly dominated by these very large 5-panel solar arrays.

The arrays together have about 800 square feet of solar-collecting surface.

The way that works is we collect all this electrical energy and we use it to ionize xenon gas down into these elemental little particle, ions.

And then we accelerate those particles to extremely high speeds by passing them through a very strong electromagnetic field which is part of the thruster itself.

And then we eject those out the thruster, basically the thruster nozzle.

June of 2029, our imagers will actually start to be able to take pictures of Psyche which are no longer just a little dot.

We'll actually start to see the body getting bigger and bigger.

And we'll use those images to optically navigate our way in, right to Psyche.

(gentle music) - It's been a long process, so 12 years so far.

And that's pretty quick for space missions actually.

And I'm anticipating that the big moment of relief from game is gonna be after the rocket leaves the ground and it's actually on its way.

That's gonna be such a relief and such a culmination.

You know, but like with so many of these things, it's just the starting line for another race.

That's the way these giant projects go.

That's really the beginning.

Then we've got this long cruise through space, and then finally at the asteroid.

So it's finish lines, and starting lines, and finish lines, and starting lines with this.

- As you've heard from the scientists and engineers, there are a lot of emotions driving the Psyche team.

These feelings will be strongest at launch and most of all when the spacecraft begins its approach to the asteroid.

- Approach, first of all, don't you love these space terms?

They're very evocative.

It's gonna be on approach.

And we're gonna be getting that picture and little Psyche is gonna be getting bigger and bigger and bigger as we approach.

And even though this is not a picture we're seeing with our own eyes, it's being seen through our robot companion who's out there looking on our behalf.

It's deeply emotional.

And I can say this authentically because I've looked at Psyche through a telescope and it made a bunch of us cry.

It made it real.

'Cause we were sitting here at this table, Psyche's not nearby, it doesn't feel nearby.

It's really far away, it's way farther away than Mars.

But when you start seeing it, you feel like it's there.

Like you finally have journeyed to it, this thing that you've dreamt about for decades and suddenly it's there in front of you.

I think it's gonna be unbelievable.

It's gonna be just like the first people who ever saw Antarctica.

And we're gonna have to rub our eyes and look again.

- If you're following the launch, and we encourage you to engage with NASA's coverage of Psyche, be on the lookout for two exciting milestones that come not long after the rocket clears the launchpad; signal acquisition, that means controllers are in contact with the spacecraft; and the unfolding of the spacecraft, especially the deployment of those big solar panel arrays.

Then keep in mind, there's much, much more work to get done for the team to get that spacecraft to Psyche.

- I can't wait for the pictures where you can start to see the craters and the features.

You know, we've been dreaming about this object and just to re-state it, we don't have any pictures of it.

We have computer-created generalized shape models but we really don't know what it looks like.

And so I've been dreaming about this object now for over a decade and by then it'll be two decades I've been dreaming about this object.

And then to see what it really looks like...

I think everything that we guess about it now is probably gonna be wrong because space is always more amazing than we can quite imagine with our minds.

And so it's gonna be that surprise.

(gentle music)