Psyche mission

In news– NASA has cancelled its planned 2022 launch attempt of the Psyche asteroid mission that was designed to study a metal-rich asteroid.

What is the Psyche mission?

Psyche is the name of an asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter and the name of a NASA space mission to visit that asteroid.
Key objectives of the mission are-
- To understand how planets and other bodies are separated into layers such as cores, mantles, and crusts.
- To examine an asteroid made of metal.
- To explore early eras of the solar system.
Psyche was selected in 2017 as part of NASA’s Discovery Program, which is a line of low-cost competition missions led by a single principal investigator.

Psyche is the first asteroid known to the world likely made largely of metal rather than rock or ice.

It appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system.
The asteroid Psyche may be able to tell us how Earth’s core and the cores of the other terrestrial (rocky) planets came to be.

NASA’s Discovery program-

The Discovery Program is a series of Solar System exploration missions funded by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration through its Planetary Missions Program Office.
The Program was founded in 1990 to implement the policy of the then-NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin of “faster, better, cheaper” planetary science missions.
Discovery missions are solicited through a call for proposals on any science topic and assessed through peer review.
The Program also includes Missions of Opportunity, which fund US participation in spacecraft operated by other space agencies, for example by contributing a single scientific instrument.
It can also be used to re-purpose an existing NASA spacecraft for a new mission.
As of June 2021, the most recently selected Discovery missions were VERITAS and DAVINCI+, the fifteenth and sixteenth missions in the program.