NASA asteroid mission suspended due to program delivery delays: The Indian Tribune

AP

Boston, 25 Jun

NASA suspended the asteroid mission on Friday, blaming delays in the delivery of its navigation software.

The Psyche mission is supposed to launch to the strange metallic asteroid of the same name in September or October. But the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is months behind in the delivery of its navigation, guidance, and control programs — an essential part of every spacecraft. Officials said on Friday that engineers were “out of time” to test it.

Now the space agency will step back, and an independent review will see what went wrong, when the spacecraft might launch again, and even if it should move forward, said Laurie Glaese, head of NASA’s planetary science division.

NASA has spent $717 million on Psyche and the total projected cost, including the rocket launch, is $985 million. The tiny, car-sized spacecraft was originally supposed to reach its asteroid in 2026 after traveling more than a billion miles.

Now that the program has delivered, there are no known problems with the spacecraft, said Lindy Elkins Tanton, Psyche’s chief scientist.

“There is one challenge that we have not been able to overcome in time to confidently launch in 2022,” he said.

There are still at least two chances for launches next year and more in 2024 to reach the asteroid, which lies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, said Laurie Lichen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This means Psyche won’t reach its asteroid until 2029 or 2030.

Timing the launch was tricky because the mission required the right sunlight conditions, said Elkins Tanton, and the asteroid was “rotating like a toaster rather than spinning like a top.”

There are two other smaller missions to share aboard the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and NASA is figuring out what will happen to those missions.

Psyche is NASA’s newest fleet of spacecraft to explore asteroids. Osiris-Rex is on its way back to Earth with the wreckage of the asteroid Bennu. Last year, NASA launched the Lucy and DART spacecraft to explore other space rocks and test whether a rocket could launch an asteroid toward Earth.

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