Science, Space and Technology News 2023
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Scientists at MIT are leading Psyche’s magnetic field and gravity studies. And, the mission as a whole has a history that traces back to MIT. Psyche’s principal investigator is MIT alumna and former professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton ’87, SM ’87, PhD ’02, now a professor at Arizona State University, while its deputy principal investigator is Benjamin Weiss, an MIT professor of planetary science.
“This will be the first time we’ve sent a mission to a body that is not mostly rock or ice, but metal,” Weiss says. “Not only is this asteroid potentially a metal world, but asteroids are building blocks of planets. So Psyche could tell us something about how planets formed.” Having just lectured on the topic of melting cores and planet formation, Elkins-Tanton offered an idea: When a planet first forms, it is little more than an accumulation of unmelted rock and dust. As more material smashes into the infant planet, the collisions jostle the innermost regions, producing a melted, churning core, surrounded by unmelted material. The molten, swirling core could spin up a magnetic field, that could imprint upon a planet’s outer, unmelted layers.
The call set off a series of brainstorming back-and-forths that eventually developed into a mission concept: to send a spacecraft to explore an ancient planetary core. The asteroid Psyche, they realized, was their best shot, as it’s relatively close to Earth and has shown signs of metal-rich, core-like content.as part of NASA’s Discovery Program. Elkins-Tanton, who had since moved to ASU, became head of the mission, while Weiss; Maria Zuber, MIT’s E.A.
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