NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
A year after NASA announced an indefinite postponement of its much-anticipated mission to visit a metal-rich asteroid, NASA announced Monday that its Psyche spacecraft has returned to orbit. The Psyche mission is now scheduled to launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket in four months, and everyone involved with the project is happy to announce that date.
“We believe Psyche is on a positive track for an October 2023 launch,” said the chairman of an independent review panel that NASA convened last summer following the mission’s postponement. Thomas Young, who served, said:
If the mission launches this fall, the spacecraft will reach the asteroid Psyche in August 2029. There, it will spend 26 months in orbit to gain insights into planet formation, understand the interiors of Earth-like terrestrial planets, and study the worlds that exist on Earth. Mainly made of metal. The mission will also be of interest to the early asteroid mining community looking to learn about the potential value of these relatively rare metallic asteroids.
a lot of problems
Over the past year, Young and the rest of the board have uncovered a number of mission problems, including serious problems with the flight software and imperfections in the process of validating that software and airframe systems.
of Report released last November, the review board put much of the blame on management at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which oversaw the development and testing of Psyche. The field center, which leads many of the space agency’s most prestigious scientific missions, was grappling with an “unprecedented workload” without the necessary resources to complete its major projects.
These problems were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred at a critical time in the final stages of Psyche mission development, hampering the hiring and in-person activities needed to complete testing of the spacecraft. rice field.
After that review, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked to respond to the review board’s recommendations to address these issues. For example, the Psyche program added an experienced team of his members, reorganized most of the workforce, and used better metrics to monitor progress towards launch and operational readiness.
A review panel was recently reconvened to consider NASA’s response, and Young said they were “extremely impressed” with the action taken. Monday’s conference call with reporters was meant to publicly share this feedback and express confidence in the looming launch date.
increase in personnel
Laurie Lehsin took over as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last year, just weeks before the Psyche program was postponed. On Monday, she said she welcomed the independent consideration of the Psyche issue and the larger issue at the California-based field center, allowing her leadership team to address them.
Since then, NASA has been aggressive in hiring people from the tech industry, which has been severely laid off, and rehiring workers lost to private space companies in the Los Angeles area, Lesin said. In some ways, she said, NASA is also a victim of its own success in trying to foster a commercial space industry in the United States.
“There is a much more important commercial space sector, so the competition from the commercial space sector is even more intense,” Lesin said. “It’s a big deal for us, but it’s really nice to see the investments we’re making and the partnerships we’re building to help advance the commercial space sector really work. is.”
Monday’s phone call was filled with entertaining conversations from Lesin and other NASA officials, including Nicola Fox, deputy director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. But Fox declined to say how much the one-year delay added to the mission’s cost, which was recently estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office at $1.13 billion.
Also, NASA has yet to prove that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory staffing and management issues are really behind it. Proof of that will be evidenced by the successful spaceflight of Psyche, the start of the ambitious European Clipper mission next year, and the resumption of work on the recently suspended Veritas mission to Venus.
