“Psyche” is both the name of an asteroid in the main belt, orbiting out past Mars, and the name of a NASA mission to visit that asteroid. The upcoming exploration of this asteroid marks an important first for humankind: We have sent people or robots to explore rocky bodies, like the Moon and Mars, and icy ones, like Europa and Enceladus, and gas-rich bodies like Jupiter, but never a body made mostly of metal. Psyche’s density, radar, and reflected light properties indicate that it is largely made of metal. If Psyche turns out to be what we think, we’ll be visiting a new kind of world.

In this Day Prize Lecture, Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton will explain how the NASA mission came to be, who is working on her team, and how far they've come in building this spacecraft and preparing to launch in 2023.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, recipient of the 2020 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship, is the lead of the NASA Psyche mission, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.

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