NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
One 12 months after NASA announced an indefinite delay of a much-anticipated mission to go to a metal-rich asteroid, the agency said Monday that the Psyche spacecraft is back on course. The Psyche mission is now scheduled to launch in 4 months on a Falcon Heavy rocket, and everybody involved within the project feels good about that date.
“We imagine Psyche is on a positive course for an October 2023 launch,” said Thomas Young, who chaired an independent review board that NASA convened last summer after the mission was delayed.
If the mission does launch this fall, the spacecraft will reach asteroid Psyche in August 2029. There, it can go into orbit for 26 months to realize insights into planetary formation, understand the inside of terrestrial planets like Earth, and examine a world that’s made largely of metal. The mission can be of interest to the nascent asteroid mining community, which seeks to learn concerning the potential value harbored by these relatively rare, metallic asteroids.
Loads of problems
Last 12 months, Young and the remaining of the board members found a litany of problems with the mission, including serious issues with the flight software and an incomplete process to confirm that software and the vehicle’s systems.
In a report published last November, the review board laid much of the blame on management at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which oversaw Psyche’s development and testing. The sphere center, which leads lots of the space agency’s most prestigious science missions, had undertaken an “unprecedented workload” without possessing the resources needed to finish major projects.
These issues were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which got here at a key time in the ultimate phase of the Psyche mission’s development and hampered hiring and in-person activities needed to finish testing of the spacecraft.
After that review, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked to answer the recommendations by the review board to deal with these issues. For instance, the Psyche program added experienced team members, reorganized a big a part of its workforce, and used higher metrics to observe progress toward launch and operational readiness.
Recently, the review board reconvened to contemplate this response by NASA, and in line with Young, its members were “extraordinarily impressed” by the actions taken. Monday’s teleconference with reporters was to share this feedback publicly and express confidence within the looming launch date.
Staffing up
Laurie Leshin became the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory just weeks before the Psyche mission was placed on hold last 12 months. On Monday, she said she welcomed the independent review of Psyche’s problems and the larger issues on the California-based field center in order that they could possibly be addressed by her leadership team.
Since then, Leshin said, NASA has been aggressive about hiring from the tech industry—which has undergone significant layoffs—and recruiting back employees who were lost to non-public space corporations within the Los Angeles area. In some ways, she said, NASA is the victim of its own success because it has sought to foster the US industrial space industry.
“There’s more competition with the industrial space sector because there may be a rather more significant industrial space sector,” Leshin said. “As hard as that’s for us, it’s really gratifying to see that the investments that we’re making, and the partnerships that we’re constructing to assist advance the industrial space sector, are really working.”
There was quite a lot of comfortable talk on the decision Monday from Leshin and other NASA officials, including Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Nevertheless, Fox declined to say how much the one-year delay added to the price of the mission, which was recently pegged at $1.13 billion by the US Government Accountability Office.
Also, NASA has yet to reveal that these staffing and management problems on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are truly behind it. The proof will include getting Psyche successfully into space, launching the ambitious Europa Clipper mission next 12 months, and restarting work on the recently paused VERITAS mission to Venus.
