Ars tours the clean room of the asteroid-orbiting spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Zoom / Technical blueprint for NASA’s Psychic Spacecraft, scheduled for launch in August 2022. Psychic Mission will explore a metallic asteroid of the same name on the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University

Ars Technica had the opportunity to visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week. Clean room sneak peak Psychological spacecraft is about to expire now. This ambitious mission, named after the asteroid you’ll be exploring, is scheduled to launch on the Balkan Heavy Rocket in August. Scientists hope that learning more about this extraordinary asteroid will improve our understanding of the formation of planets and the early days of our solar system.

It was discovered by an Italian astronomer in March 1852 Annebel de Casparis16 Psychic is M-type asteroid. (that is, it has a high content of metal) With an unusual shape resembling a potato, the main asteroid belt orbits around the sun. The long-favored hypothesis is that the soul is the prominent mineral center of a protoplanet (planetary) from the early days of our solar system, removed by collision (or multiple collisions) with other bodies in its crust and crust. Scientists have concluded in recent years that estimates of mass and density do not correspond to each other. All-metal residue core. In turn, it is a complex alloy of metals and silicates.

Alternatively, the asteroid may at one time be the mother body of a certain type of rocky and iron meteorite, which crashed and rejoined as a mixture of metal and silicate. Or it could be such a thing 1 seriesWith the exception of a dwarf planet — 16 in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — Psyche may have experienced periods of iron volcanism during cooling, leaving highly concentrated minerals in those volcanic centers.

Zoom / Many scenes of 16 souls were filmed through a very large telescope.

Scientists have long suspected that metal cores are trapped deep within terrestrial planets like Earth. But those cores are buried under stony crustaceans and crustaceans far beyond what researchers can find. The object, resembling a single mineral core, was found, and provides the perfect opportunity to shed light on how the rocky planets in our solar system (Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars) formed. NASA agreed psychological work In 2017, it plans to send a spacecraft to orbit the asteroid and collect important data about its properties.

“Our understanding of what psychology might be hasn’t changed in the past few years,” Linda Elkins Danton, of Arizona State University, Lars, told Lars, lead researcher on the Psychological Expedition. “It should have a lot of mineral content, but we don’t really know how much. It may have been part of the mineral core of a small planet from the beginning of the solar system or it may have never melted. We don’t really know until he’s gone. “

There will be many tools in the Psychological spacecraft to collect that precious scientific data. There is a multispectral imager capable of generating high-resolution images to tell scientists the difference between the mineral and silicate (mineral) components of an asteroid. The task of mapping the composition of the asteroid and identifying all the elements falls to the gamma ray spectrometer and the neutron. There is a magnetometer that measures and maps the magnetic field residuals. Finally, the microwave radiocommunication system can measure the asteroid’s gravitational field and gather clues about its internal structure.

Zoom / A scale model of a psychic spacecraft.

Jennifer Owlette

The chassis, made by satellite company Maxer Technologies, was delivered last April. It’s about the size of a passenger truck and is mostly built on commercial off-the-shelf technology. “Once the spacecraft is in space, it will use an innovative method of propulsion called hall thrusters to reach the asteroid,” said Ars’ senior space editor. By Eric Berger last year. “This is the first time a spacecraft has entered deep space using Hall Thrusters, and without this technology the psychological mission wouldn’t have happened – and certainly no less than $1 billion.” there he is A little more than a Berger About this innovative approach:

Chemically powered engines are ideal for getting rockets off the Earth’s surface when they need energy to break Earth’s gravity. But chemical rocket engines aren’t the most fuel-efficient engines in the world because they suck up momentum. Once a spacecraft is in space, there are more fuel-efficient mechanisms to orbit it. NASA is doing an experiment [solar electric propulsion] technology for a while. The space agency first tested electric propulsion technology on the Deep Space 1 mission, which launched in 1998, and then in 2007 visited Vesta and Ceres on the asteroid belt on the Dawn mission.

These spacecraft used ion thrusters. In contrast, Hall impellers use a simple design with a magnetic field to control the flow of the pulses. These motives were discovered in the Soviet Union and later adopted for commercial purposes by Maxer and other companies. Many of the large communications satellites in geostationary orbit today, such as DirectTV, use Hall Thrusters to maintain the station.

Using technology based on Hall Thruster, mission scientists and engineers helped design a small, inexpensive spacecraft. Each Hall Thruster on a bike produces three times more thrust and twice as much force than the Ion Thrusters on the Dawn spacecraft. This will allow the spacecraft to reach the psychic asteroid located in the main belt, in January 2026, after a 3.5-year journey.

psychic group Dual solar arrays tested In March, attach the rows to the spacecraft’s body, stretching them lengthwise, before laying out the panels until the August launch. The five cross-panel solar panels are the largest, installed at the JPL, and measure 800 square feet (75 square meters). They are specifically designed to operate in low light conditions out of the sun.