NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission is on track for 2023 launch, review board determines

An independent review board gave NASA’s Psyche mission the green light and its seal of approval following a scathing review in 2022. 

The Psyche mission, which will head to the asteroid belt, was originally set to launch in October, but it was put on hold due to issues with the spacecraft’s software. The issue was ultimately corrected, but not in enough time to make the launch window. An independent review board was convened to determine what exactly happened.

The board’s review revealed workforce issues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that led to the delay. However, since then, the review board has noted that JPL and the Psyche team have taken the steps — which included adding more experienced members to the team, reorganizing the workforce, and monitoring the project with more comprehensive metrics — to turn the project around and ensure that it can make it to the launch pad, calling the effort “outstanding.” 

“The IRB believes the response to our Psyche project and JPL institution findings and recommendations to be excellent,” retired aerospace executive A. Thomas Young, who led the IRB, said during a press conference on Monday.

“We believe that Psyche is on a positive course for an October 2023 launch,” he added. “We believe the 2023 launch readiness date is credible, and the overall probability of mission success is high.”

Psyche is set to explore a metallic core of an asteroid that is 140 miles wide and located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Had it launched as originally scheduled, the spacecraft would have arrived at its destination in early 2026; however, now teams have to find an alternate route to the target, putting its arrival in 2029. 

This new path also removes the mission’s side project: a small satellite mission called Janus that would have traveled with the Psyche spacecraft to visit two binary asteroid systems.

The mission delays have also affected other projects at JPL, namely the center’s Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy (or VERITAS) mission. 

NASA says that while no people were pulled off the VERITAS project to work on Psyche, it was affected.

“What happened with VERITAS is, it didn’t ramp up as expected, and Psyche stayed ramped up longer,” JPL Director Laurie Leshin said during Monday’s press conference. “Psyche has been staffed for most of this year at about 160 workers,” she added. “And some of those may have gone off to work VERITAS if Psyche had launched, but I’m not certain of those numbers.”

The Psyche mission aims to help scientists understand how rocky planets form and evolve. To that end, the spacecraft will explore what is thought to be the metallic core of a planetary body also called Psyche.

According to researchers, Psyche might be the partial core of a shattered planetesimal — a small world the size of a city or small country that is the first building block of a planet. Data collected could shed light on the interiors of terrestrial planets like Earth.

Psyche is scheduled to launch no earlier than October atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.