After a Mars flyby on May 15, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is well on its way to a 2029 rendezvous with the asteroid for which it is named, in search of evidence for how planets like ours first formed.
According to NASA‘s analysis of signals between the Psyche spacecraft and NASA’s Deep Space Network, the craft passed by Mars at a distance of less than 3,000 miles, achieving a gravity assist that boosted its speed and adjusted its orbital panel, without expending any precious propellant.
The NASA craft’s destination, the asteroid Psyche, is a metal-rich space object residing between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt and may represent some of the early building blocks of our Solar System.
NASA Confirms Mission Success
“Although we were confident in our calculations and flight plan, monitoring the DSN’s Doppler signal in real time during the flyby was still exciting,” said Don Han, Psyche’s navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“We’ve confirmed that Mars gave the spacecraft a 1,000-mile-per-hour boost and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the Sun. We are now on course for arrival at the asteroid Psyche in summer 2029,” Han added.
With conserving fuel and power a necessity on any space mission, Psyche’s instruments were not powered up and calibrated until mere days before its Martian flyby. Although the craft’s imagers, magnetometers, and gamma-ray and neutron spectrometers were designed to capture data on Psyche, NASA scientists were able to give them a trial run by observing Mars while on approach.
This test allowed the instruments to observe the Red Planet at an unusual high phase angle, when it appeared as a narrow crescent illuminated by the Sun. Some of the data collected surprised the team, with the crescent (seen below) extending farther and appearing brighter than expected.
NASA Calibrates Psyche
“We’ve captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet’s surface and atmosphere at close approach,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe.
“This dataset provides unique and important opportunities for us to calibrate and characterize the performance of the cameras, as well as test the early versions of our image processing tools being developed for use at the asteroid Psyche,” Bell added.
Bell is no stranger to NASA’s extraterrestrial missions, also leading the team working on the Perseverance Mars rover’s Mastcam-Z imaging investigation. He added that calibration efforts would continue targeting Mars for the rest of the month, until the planet was out of range.
However, the Psyche spacecraft’s magnetometer calibration tests made another intriguing discovery: the team believes it detected the planet’s bow shock, a shock wave produced by the impact of stellar winds.
Rounding out the calibration effort, previous Mars data will also provide helpful information to the team responsible for calibrating the spacecraft’s gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer.
Rendezvous with Psyche
NASA’s Psyche mission is now on its way to its final destination, which is estimated to be reached in August 2029. Its target, the 173-mile-wide asteroid Psyche, is hypothesized to be the remnant of an ancient planetary building block known as a planetesimal.
Once the craft arrives, it will assume a variable circular orbit, coming in closer and retreating to greater distances, seeking evidence of whether the asteroid contains a metallic core.
“We’ve been anticipating the Mars flyby for years, but now it’s complete. We can thank the Red Planet for giving our spacecraft a critical gravitational slingshot farther into the solar system,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Onward to the asteroid Psyche!” she added.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.