Psyche is scheduled to reach the asteroid Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in July 2029.
JPL is providing the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration instrument to fly on Psyche to test high-data-rate laser communications.
The Psyche spacecraft will travel about 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) to reach asteroid Psyche.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is scheduled to launch on 2023-10-05 at 10:38 a.m. EDT (7:38 a.m. PDT).
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft was photographed in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near Kennedy Space Center on 2023-06-26.
Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program, which is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Psyche spacecraft was powered on and connected to ground support equipment on 2022-12-08 to enable engineers and technicians to prepare it for launch in 2023.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft was in a clean room on 2022-12-08 at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch NASA’s Psyche asteroid exploration mission in October 2023.
Janus, a SIMPLEx mission that was to ride with Psyche, is now in limbo after the Psyche mission was delayed to October 2023.
The delay in Psyche’s launch led NASA to delay the JPL-led VERITAS Venus mission by three years.
NASA removed ESCAPADE from the Psyche launch in 2020 after a trajectory change linked to Psyche’s switch from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy prevented ESCAPADE from achieving Mars orbit as originally designed.
Janus was scheduled to launch as a secondary payload on the Falcon Heavy launch of Psyche in 2022.
VERITAS had taken steps to address recommendations from the Psyche independent review by moving work out of JPL and reducing spending in 2022 and 2023.
NASA plans to use the VERITAS postponement to offset the workforce imbalance for at least three years and to provide some of the increased funding required to continue Psyche toward its 2023 launch.
Janus’s original planned flyby targets, asteroid 1991 VH and asteroid 1996 FG3, are no longer possible due to the Psyche delay.
NASA postponed the Psyche launch indefinitely in June 2023 after determining there would not be enough time to complete testing of the spacecraft’s flight software.
Psyche was originally scheduled to launch in August 2023 before being delayed to a backup window in late September to early October 2023.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft was set to launch in August 2022 and uses four Hall thrusters for solar electric propulsion to travel to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche.
NASA delayed the Psyche launch earlier from 2022-08-01 because of the software testing issue.