With its solar arrays installed, the spacecraft is close to its final
configuration ahead of a planned August launch.
NASA's Psyche mission is almost ready for its moment in the Sun—a
1.5-billion-mile (2.4-billion-kilometer) solar-powered journey to a
mysterious, metal-rich asteroid of the same name. Twin solar arrays have
been attached to the spacecraft body, unfolded lengthwise, and then
restowed. This test brings the craft that much closer to completion before
its August launch.
"Seeing the spacecraft fully assembled for the first time is a huge
accomplishment; there's a lot of pride," said Brian Bone, who leads
assembly, test, and launch operations for the mission at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "This is the true fun part.
You're feeling it all come together. You feel the energy change and shift."
At 800 square feet (75 square meters), the five-panel, cross-shaped solar
arrays are the largest ever installed at JPL, which has built many
spacecraft over the decades. When the arrays fully deploy in flight, the
spacecraft will be about the size of a singles tennis court. After a 3
½-year solar-powered cruise, the craft will arrive in 2026 at the asteroid
Psyche, which is 173 miles (280 kilometers) at its widest point and thought
to be unusually rich in metal. The spacecraft will spend nearly two years
making increasingly close orbits of the asteroid to study it.
Venturing to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, far from the Sun,
presents challenges for this mission, which adapted standard Earth-orbiting
commercial satellite technology for use in the cold and dark of deep space.
Near Earth, the solar arrays generate 21 kilowatts—enough electricity to
power three or four average U.S. homes. But at Psyche, they'll produce only
about 2 kilowatts—sufficient for little more than a hair dryer.
The underlying technology isn't much different from solar panels installed
on a home, but Psyche's are hyper-efficient, lightweight, radiation
resistant, and able to provide more power with less sunlight, said Peter
Lord, Psyche technical director at Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto,
California, where the arrays and solar electric propulsion chassis were
built. "These arrays are designed to work in low-light conditions, far away
from the Sun," he added.
After the successful installation and deployment of the three center panels
inside a clean room at JPL, Psyche's arrays were folded back against the
chassis and stowed for additional spacecraft testing. The arrays will return
to Maxar, which has specialized equipment to test the deployment of the two
perpendicular cross panels. Later this spring, the arrays will be reunited
with the spacecraft at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and stowed for
launch from Cape Canaveral.
About an hour after launch, the arrays will deploy and latch into place in a
process that will take 7 ½ minutes per wing. They will then provide all the
power for the journey to asteroid Psyche, as well as the power needed to
operate the science instruments: a magnetometer to measure any magnetic
field the asteroid may have, imagers to photograph and map its surface, and
spectrometers to reveal the composition of that surface. The arrays also
power the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration that
will test high-data-rate laser communications.
What those instruments relay to scientists will help them better understand
the mysterious asteroid. One possible explanation for Psyche's unusually
high metal content is that it formed early in our solar system's history,
either as remnant core material from a planetesimal—one of the building
blocks of rocky planets—or as primordial material that never melted. This
mission aims to find out, and to help answer fundamental questions about
Earth's own metal core and the formation of our solar system.
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Space & Astrophysics