2025 Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lectures Public Lecture: The NASA Psyche Mission: First Visit to an Unknown World

The NASA Psyche mission, in flight in space as you read this, is on its way to visit an immensely ancient object in our asteroid belt: A metal body, the first humans will ever have visited. When our solar system was just an infant, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in fewer than one million years. That's the same as saying, if the 4,567,000,000 years that our solar system has existed was instead a 24-hour day, the planetesimals formed in the first 18 seconds. Many planetesimals melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may still exist, revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. I'll discuss what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid, how we have planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this unknown object, how we progressed as a team through intense challenges, and an update of where we are just over two years post-launch.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist, and the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission. She is Director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. Previously, she was an Arizona State University VP and Regents Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. Elkins-Tanton's research concerns the formation and evolution of rocky planets; volcanic activity and extinctions on Earth; as well as on effective teams and future-facing educational practices. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.

Header image: Artists' impression of Psyche spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU