We’ll must wait one other week to see NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission take flight.
Psyche had been scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Oct. 5. But that is not the plan; the mission team has pushed the liftoff back to Oct. 12.
“The change allows the NASA team to finish verifications of the parameters used to manage the Psyche spacecraft’s nitrogen cold gas thrusters,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Thursday evening (Sept. 28).
“The parameters were recently adjusted in response to updated, warmer temperature predictions for these thrusters,” they added. “Operating the thrusters inside temperature limits is important to make sure the long-term health of the units.”
The one-week delay cuts considerably into Psyche’s launch window, which runs through Oct. 25.
The slip was announced the identical day that the NASA, SpaceX and Psyche mission managers conducted a flight readiness review at KSC. During that meeting, a go-ahead was given to perform a “static fire” of the Falcon Heavy on Friday (Sept. 29), NASA officials said. Static fires are standard prelaunch tests, by which a rocket’s first-stage engines are fired briefly while the vehicle stays anchored to the bottom.
The Psyche launch can be just the eighth overally for the Falcon Heavy, the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation after NASA’s Space Launch System. Psyche can be the primary NASA mission for the Heavy.
The $1.2 billion Psyche mission will study a bizarre metallic asteroid of the identical name. If all goes in accordance with plan, the spacecraft will arrive on the 170-mile-wide (280 kilometers) space rock Psyche, which resides within the fundamental asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.
Scientists think Psyche could be the exposed core of a protoplanet — the constructing blocks of worlds equivalent to Earth — whose rocky outer layers were stripped away by a number of violent impacts. Humanity has never seen such an object up close before.
“I’m so looking forward to seeing those first images,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division, said during a news conference on Sept. 6. “They’ll be spectacular, once we finally get to see what this metal looks like up close.”