 greet each other in the chat and remember down in that little blue button, make sure you select everyone so we can all see your greetings. So 2004, and so I wonder, because between 04 and 07, I was a coordinator for NASA Explorer Schools. I wonder if you ever came and did anything for one of the big national events or did you ever visit any of the schools that were involved in that project? I don't think so at that time. At that time, I was a faculty research associate and I was doing a lot of research. And when I started doing education outreach, it was mostly within the Phoenix metro area. For example, on the chat, I see Paul Facuna has joined from the Phoenix Astronomical Society. They're one of the first local astronomy clubs that I started speaking to. So I usually speak to them about once a year, but it was mostly our local astronomy clubs, our local community groups, lions clubs, Kiwanis clubs, and as well as our local science fiction fantasy conventions that we have here in the Phoenix metro area. And then when I would go out of state, it would usually be like to the big Star Trek convention they have in Las Vegas every August and a few other places. So. Comic Con. Yes, Phoenix Comic Con. I've never been to San Diego. San Diego is way too big for me, but. Yeah, I've never been to any of them, so. Well, we're at the top of the hour. And so let's go ahead and get started. And so hello everyone and welcome to the February NASA Night Sky Network member webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to present this webinar with our guest speaker, Dr. David Williams from Arizona State University. Welcome to everyone joining us on the YouTube live stream. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the Night Sky Network. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, check the links in the chat that I'll put up there in just a moment. And before we introduce David Williams, here's David Prosper with just a few announcements. Hi everyone. Just wanna let you know we have several items of note, but I'm gonna try and get to them very quickly. First of all, we have the announcement for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's annual Astronomy Awards. Nominations are now open. So you can get your favorite astronomer recognition for their hard work and contributions to astronomy by nominating them for one of these awards. You don't need to be a member of the ASP or NSN to nominate someone they're open to the public. Anyone can nominate anyone. But preferably an astronomer who deserves it. Two in particular are aimed at amateur astronomers, the Los Cumbres Amateur Outreach Award for standing outreach by an amateur astronomer to children in the public and the Gordon Meyers Amateur Achievement Award for significant observational or technical achievements by an amateur astronomer. The nominations are due on March 15th. We have more information in our newsletter and which will be in your inboxes on the main Night Sky Network page and at the link in the chat. Next up, we also have another fun event, the Web First Light Events. NASA is recruiting folks to hold First Light Events. That means when they get... Web kind of gets its first real nice pictures. It's testing right now. You may have seen some of those alignment pictures released earlier. So, help NASA bring this historic moment in our common exploration of the Water Universe to your community through the Web Community Events Initiative. They'll be supporting these community events throughout the U.S. and beyond around the release of Web's first images. This will be in July 2022. So you've got time to prepare. So you need to apply to host your own event and add it to the official list or partner with existing events in your area or help spread the word and ask potential venues to apply to host an event. And I will put a link in the chat with more info on that. It'll also be back to back because my other link didn't share out for some reason. So I'm gonna have a bunch of links for you all in a second. All right. Now, I believe a couple more little things that were done. We just have some program news. Some of you may have noticed when you logged in, you might have a lot of extra pending events. This is from a bug in our website's resource manager, which we have hopefully fixed. So if you submitted a bunch of recurring events, you might not have received a confirmation of them that be pending, just message us if you want us to help you deal with those pending events by either removing or approving them at a night sky info at astrosociety.org. And also, and of course, we are still accepting orders for pins for your wonderful volunteers. And we have information on how to order them at the link in the chat, which is also bit.ly slash nsnpins2021. And it's also in the newsletter. That is it from me. Let's get started. Back to you, Brian. All right, thanks, Dave. And for those of you who are interested in the web community events, stay tuned for our March webinar, which is gonna feature two people from the Space Telescope Science Institute who are gonna give us a whole lot of information about how you can get involved with having those events in your community. So come back for that. And we'd love to have you there and to ask questions from the folks directly at the end of that webinar. So for those of you on Zoom, you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the Zoom window on your desktop. Please make sure to keep the chat window for greeting each other, making sure that you select that everyone button down at the bottom. Any questions you have for Dr. Williams, please put those in the Q&A. It really helps us to not lose track of them. If you have any difficulties with the audio or sound, you can also put that in the chat. You can also send us a note at nightskyinfo at astrosociety.org. So I'm gonna hit record now. Hey, welcome again to the February webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month, we welcome Dr. David Williams to our webinar. Dr. David Williams is a research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Dr. Williams is the director of the Ronald Greeley Center for Planetary Studies, a NASA-funded planetary data center at ASU. He's also the director of the NASA Planetary Aeolian Laboratory which administers wind tunnels at Ames Research Center in California. His current research focuses on planetary geologic mapping of bodies across the solar system and computer modeling of the physical and geochemical evolution of lava flows in a variety of planetary involvements. You know, we've had all these geologists on lately which just kind of makes me happy as originally I was a geologist and so I'm delighted that we were having so many geologists on lately. So David's involvement has also included NASA's Magellan Mission to Venus, Galileo Mission to Jupiter, Don Mission to asteroid Vesta in the North Planet Series and ESA's Mars Express Orbiter Mission. He's currently the deputy imager lead and the co-investigator on NASA's Psyche mission scheduled to launch this August asteroid 10461, now Williams was named in his honor. So please welcome David Williams. Alrighty, thank you very much. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Alrighty, first a shout out there. I saw there was somebody there from the Michiana Astronomical Society in South Bend, Indiana. That is my hometown. That is where I grew up. So great to see somebody from there. I will share my screen and put us into the full mode there. So the title of my presentation is Psyche Journey to a Metal World and it is February 15th. So I'm very happy to be here. This is actually my second time speaking to the Night Sky Network. So I'm really happy that you invited me back here and as we get close to launch it's great to tell you a little bit about our mission to asteroid 16 Psyche. So before I begin the bulk of my talk focusing on Psyche, I usually when I speak to new audiences like to give a little bit of background and start off with this slide about why we choose to explore space. Now, since you guys are a science savvy audience there you probably understand all of these reasons there for doing it for the science, doing it for national prestige, for national security, for economic reasons, sustainability to inspire and educate the next generation of scientists and engineers and of course, perhaps most importantly to transform humanity into a multi-planet species. We wanna avoid the dinosaurs' fate. The reason why they didn't survive is because they didn't have a space program. They couldn't detect that asteroid that struck in the Yucatan 65 million years ago and deflected and that is something that we're developing the capability to do. So these are all the reasons why we choose to explore space. Now, what is NASA's role in space exploration? Well, many of you probably know that NASA has four what they call mission directorates, aeronautics research, which supports the air transportation system to move people and cargo around the earth. The space technology mission directorate actually develops the technology to help people live and work in space. The human exploration operations directorate, H-E-M-O-D-E-M-O-M-D, that's the part that most people think about when they think of NASA. That's the astronauts, that's the International Space Station, it was a space shuttle, now it's the rockets that are gonna be replacing it. The division that involves all the science stuff is called the science mission directorate and it's actually split into five divisions now. Heliophysics, which studies the sun or science, which studies the earth. Planetary science, which studies everything in the solar system except for the sun and the earth. The astrophysics division studies everything outside the solar system and a recently nuclear created division is called biological and physical sciences and their job is to take study of biology and physics and integrate that and advanced research for all the other divisions. So now that we know that we have a planetary sciences division, how do we use, how does that division choose to explore the solar system with robotic spacecraft? Well, we do this in a very phased approach. We do what's technically possible, but we have the engineering skills to do and build. We do what's affordable, what Congress will give us the money to do. Then we do the easiest missions first, we accomplish them successfully and then we move on to the more complex missions. And you see listed here, this chain of bullets here are the different types of robotic planetary missions in order of increasing difficulty, size and complexity. The easiest is what we call a planetary fly by mission. You basically launch a spacecraft from the earth, it flies by a planetary body, it takes pictures, transmits the data back. That is, gives us the initial reconnaissance of a planetary object. Next, you wanna go into orbit, you need an orbiter. This is actually a spacecraft that can slow down, get into orbit and as the planet rotates or body rotates underneath it, the spacecraft is able to acquire a global dataset. You get a global assessment of the object. So once you know about something from earth, you wanna go down to the ground and land on it. So that's where landers come in. And the first type that was developed are hard landers. Those are the ones that just descend, they go down, they take pictures, you get closer and closer and closer then they smash into the ground, the instruments are broken, they're of limited use. We must prefer soft landers, something that has parachutes or retro rockets or airbags or something that allows it to slow down, land on the surface. And then all the instruments work, you can fully analyze your landing side, do those wonderful 360 degree prana ramas. Of course, once you've landed on a body and you look out across in the distance, you always see something interesting on the horizon that you wish you could get to. So to do that, you need mobility and that's where rovers come in. They give us the mobility to move on land with either wheels or legs or if it's a planetary body with an atmosphere like Mars or Venus or Saturn's moon Titan, you might be able to use some sort of aerial vehicle like the ingenuity helicopter that accompanied the Perseverance rover on Mars. Next most complex and difficult and hard thing to do is called a robotic sample return where you actually collect a sample of rock or soil or ice or atmosphere, put it into a container, launch it from that body and bring it back to Earth. That's really easy to do for low gravity bodies like asteroids and comets, but much harder to do for heavy gravity bodies like moons or planets. The final one out there, which is the hardest to do and the most expensive are the crewed missions to send humans to actually orbit and land on a planetary body. So this chart here shows you the status of solar system exploration as of this year, 2022. You see those different modes of exploration from flybys to crewed missions across the top. You see the major objects in our solar system from Mercury close to the sun all the way out through Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. And I've included telescopic observations because that's how we discovered all of them in the first place. You see that we've accomplished the initial reconnaissance of the solar system with the, started with the Mariner 2 flyby of Venus in 1962 and was completed with the New Horizons flybys of Pluto in 2015 and the cold classical Kuiper Belt object AeroCoff in January of 2019. Orbiters, you can see there around most of the interplanets, asteroids and comets. We've had Galileo and Juno at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn. We're in the process of developing a mission to go to one of the ice giants, the planet Uranus or Neptune. As you look at this chart, anything that's in green or blue is active and funded right now. White is something that occurred in the past. It's accomplished. Things that are in yellow or red or orange are things that are in development or in study but have not yet been funded by the governments yet. You see for landers, we've had landers on most of the interplanets, the atmospheric probe into Jupiter, the Huygens probe onto Saturn's moon Titan. Rovers, we have a new one coming for Venus with the two new Venus missions that were approved last June, Veritas and Da Vinci Plus. Rovers active on Mars. We've had them on the moon, of course, the dragonfly, the drone copter to explore Saturn's moon Titan is coming in the next decade, the 2030s. Osiris-Rex is returning its samples of near Earth asteroid Bennu and we're in the process of developing the Mars sample return campaign. The Perseverance rover is the first part of that to bring samples back to Earth by the end of this decade. And of course, for human missions only the Apollo missions exist. So what I like to say is our goal is to completely fill in this chart, to completely explore the solar system robotically and with humans and then we'll be able to boldly go where no one has gone before, as they say in many of our favorite show. So with that as a background, let me tell you about the main point of this presentation which is asteroids and psyche. So first I'd like to give you a little bit of background on asteroids, what they are, where are they located and why we care about asteroid psyche. Some of the major points about the psyche mission itself, its objectives, its instruments, how it's gonna operate, the observations and the expected results. And also tell you about what we've learned about asteroid 16 psyche in the last five years since the mission was first approved. And then look ahead at some of our other active asteroid missions and conclude with the Q and A. So make sure if you have any questions, put them in the Q and A and I'll get to them at the end of the presentation. So asteroids, what are they? They're minor planets, some to call them protoplanets. They tend to have diameters less than 500 kilometers. They're mostly irregularly shaped like this image of asteroid Lutetia image by the Issa Rosetta mission. They tend to be composed of silicate rock, dust and maybe some amount of volatiles. And in this context, the word volatile means basically ices. Probably mostly water ice. As you get to the outer solar system, you get more exotic ices like carbon dioxide or methane or ammonia. Where are asteroids located? Well, most of them are in the main asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. There's a population of asteroids that are at Lagrange points of Jupiter's orbit around the sun. They're called the Trojan asteroids. And we just launched a mission called Lucy that is on the way there right now. The centaurs are a population of asteroids are basically between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. And then of course, there's the ones that we tend to hear about the most than NEAs, the near-Earth asteroids. And those are asteroids that have orbits that come near, close to or across that of the Earth and the inner planets. There are about 4,700 of these potentially hazardous NEAs that could theoretically impact on the Earth. And there's so many of these and over the years you always hear about it. I put the names of some of them and we can just look at a couple of them here. Here you see this is the one that came in. It occurred at the same time as the Chicksaloo, but this is the one that we knew about from February 15th of 2013, a record closest approach coming in very fast above the orbit of the space station, below the orbit of the geosynchronous satellites. Radar image from Goldstone, as you see the video at the top and you see the graphic about this. This one was about 45 meters long, same size as the impactor that made meteor crater here in Arizona. It would have had a 2.4 megaton blast if it hit and up to destroy everything around 50 miles. It wasn't a civilization under like Chicksaloo, the one that ended the dinosaurs. That one was a 10 kilometer diameter impactor produced the 180 kilometer crater that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So not that big. Now the thing that made it interesting cause people were all focused on this one that they knew about, but then that's the same day that the Chicksaloo impact came in the meteor that came from the main belt that wasn't expected. It exploded over Russia, entered a very 18 kilometers per second and about 17 meter diameter came in from a different direction. It was an air birch as you recall, 12 to 15 miles above ground, 500 kiloton blasts. It had that shockwave that busted out a lot of windows and some damage, no fatalities. A bunch of the meteorites were found here. So we lucked out on that one. And of course you probably recall this from a couple of years ago, the Oumuamua as it's been named by since it was discovered by the Hawaiian Pan stars telescope there, our extra solar visitor that came in from outside. We've had my colleagues here in the school of earth and space exploration as you have done some work. They think it's a piece of a dwarf planet that just happened to be passing through our solar system. There's an artist concept of what this thing probably looked like. So these, these near-earth asteroids are very interesting. They're very potentially dangerous. NASA has a whole program to study them. Most of what we know about asteroids from the main belt and other locations we know from their reflected light spectra is image by telescopes. There's 14 types of asteroids. The C type is the largest class they're mostly carbonaceous, the S type stony, DNP dark primitive types. These are the Trojan asteroids which we'll get our first look at at Lucy later this decade. M type is what's interesting about Psyche and from metallic in this case. And V type is what Vesta was, asteroid for Vesta, the first target of the Dawn mission which I worked on. V for volcanic because it had the same minerals you find in the saltic rocks. So we can understand asteroids not only from their reflected light spectra but also from meteorites because meteorites as you all know are pieces of asteroids that we can study in our labs. And from all of these data, the conclusion is that asteroids are rocks that never coalesced into a planet. The intense gravity of Jupiter causes resonances at that location, the solar system that inhibited a planet from actually forming at that location. Ceres, dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object out there. So here you see, this is a chart. These are all the missions that have been sent to study asteroids. And the ones that are in bold were are ones where the asteroid was the primary target of the mission. So you see the first few missions that image asteroids, the target was something else. And I was actually there as a graduate student when Galileo did the first asteroid five-by of 951 Gaspera and also for 243 Ida. Eros was the first one, 433 Eros by the Near Earth Asteroid rendezvous mission in the year 2000. So not all that far in the past. And then you see the other missions it's been more recently in the past decade that we've had the asteroid dedicated missions, including Dawn to Best in Ceres, Hayabusa to one and two it first did a call with then Riyugu, Osiris Rex and now most recently, Lucy and Psyche. And so here's a great graphic. This was made by Emily Locto all of the planetary society. And this is the, all of the asteroids and comets that were imaged by spacecraft prior to Dawn's arrival at asteroid four best in 2011. And you see very well that these are regularly shaped. They're cratered objects. They're rocky. You can see lineations that might indicate structure. You can see boulders on some of them are really good graphic of the nature of what asteroids are like. In comparison to other planetary objects you see the two largest objects in the main belt, Ceres and Vesta which are much smaller than the Earth, Moon, Mercury and Mars. But they are still relatively good size objects. So why do we care about Psyche? What is the essence of Psyche? Well, the asteroid Psyche was the 16th asteroid discovered by Hanabali DeGaspers of Naples on March 17th of 1852. It's not round. It's more of a potato shape there. It's roughly elliptical. You see the dimensions there. It orbits about 2.9 astronomical units from the Sun. So it's at the edge of the outer edge of the main belt. Takes about five years to orbit the Sun. It takes about four hours to rotate on its axis. These images you hear are from light curves and shape models from Earth-based telescopic observations. And what we know so far from those is Psyche has been classified as an M-class. M in this case means metallic. We think this could be the parent body of at least some classes of iron meteorites. Could it be the parent body of a parasite? Which we think is a type of meteorite that comes from a planetary lower mantle core boundary. Could it be for some other one? But what we know about it is at the time that the Psyche mission was approved in 2017, we think that Psyche could be the exposed core of a planetary body. It has a very high density. It has some porosity. It probably has some regolith. Probably has some silicates, maybe even water ice on its surface. So when Psyche was approved in January of 17 as NASA's next discovery mission, that was a time when a lot of astronomers started really focusing in their telescopes on Psyche to learn more and more about it. And I'll get to what they've discovered in the last five years in a bit. So here you see that group of asteroid. You remember Lutitia in that montage was the largest one there. And now I've put Vesta on here. Vesta is the size of Arizona and New Mexico if you go across it. And now I'll put on Psyche. So Psyche you see is larger than Lutitia but smaller than Vesta. To put it in words, Psyche is the size of the state of Massachusetts if you leave off Cape Cod or the distance between Phoenix and Flagstaff if you've ever driven that distance. Here's another model you see with Vesta and Psyche. I'll put in Eros and then put on Bennu which is just a very small dot in that square there. So it leads to an interesting question. How small an asteroid can you have and still have planetary processes occur? Differentiation where you form a cross-mendland core. That's an interesting question. We know that that happened at least for something as small as Vesta. We learned that from the Dawn mission. So when you propose to do a planetary mission to a particular body, you need to have a set of definitive science objectives. Scientific questions you want to answer from your mission. And these are the five main questions we're going to investigate with the Psyche mission to asteroid 16 Psyche. Is it a core or did it never undergo melting? What are the relative ages of the different parts of its surface? Do small metal bodies incorporate light elements expected to be inside Earth's high pressure core? Did Psyche form under more oxidizing reducing conditions than the Earth's core? And what is the unique topography of this metal world? So very, very broad science questions that we want to answer with this mission. Now, based on what we know up through 2017 about Psyche, the theory is that in the formation of the early formation of the solar system, you had a gas cloud that accreted and pebbles started to form out as there were impacts. These accreted into planetismals. The planetismals accreted to form embryos and those embryos eventually became the rocky planets that we have in the inner solar system. In some cases though, in these collisions they may not be dead on, you might have what are called hidden run impacts that actually knock off the primitive crust and mantles on these objects that could expose the inner core. And this is the working theory of what Psyche might be. So here's just another graphic cartoon here to show you this. So imagine a planetismal, it's got a molten core, it's got a solidified outer crust and a mantle. It's hit by this side on hidden run impact and knocks off most of the crust and mantle. It exposes the liquid iron core. It will be spinning, it'll generate a magnetic field, it'll start to freeze perhaps from the top down from the inside out, we don't know. The metal will freeze, it'll expel sulfur because sulfur and metal is immiscible. They separate, eventually it'll freeze entirely, locking in the magnetic field and further impacts will go on the surface. Could this be what Psyche is like? Well, we're gonna send a spacecraft there to find out. And this graphic here shows you what the spacecraft looks like. It looks a lot like a typical earth orbiting satellite, except we have some instruments on it. So besides the high gain antenna and we have ion thrusters, I'll talk about ion propulsion a minute. You see a pair of cameras over here next to the guy and then you see this jungle gym behind the high gain antenna, which has the other instruments upset a pair of magnetometers as well as a gamma ray spectrometer and a neutron spectrometer. And then there's this other instrument, DSOC, Deep Space Optical Communication. This is gonna test laser communication of information out to Mars orbit distance. And I'll mention that a bit more detail later. So if you put Psyche solar panels on it in the configuration, here's what it looks like. You see, it makes the Psyche spacecraft about the size of a tennis court. So how are we gonna do this mission? Well, we're going to launch in August of this year. We'll, after we launch on a big chemical rocket, we're gonna launch on a Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. We'll boost it out of the earth's gravitational field. Then we're gonna fire up some ion propulsion, ion engines and we'll thrust for a long time and we'll spiral out from the sun and we'll basically go around the sun in the spiral orbit. We'll do a Mars flyby for a gravity assist in May of 2023, where you see these blue dots. That's when we're gonna be testing the Deep Space Optical Communication. And we're just gonna keep spiraling on the sun as we move outward and we move faster and faster until we catch up with asteroid 16 Psyche. We'll move into orbit and we're gonna do four successive different orbits of different altitudes to study the service with our instruments. So the cruise out there is gonna take 3.4 years. So if we launch in August of 2022, we'll get there in January of 2026. Now I mentioned ion propulsion. What's the big deal about ion propulsion other than something that you've heard talked about in Star Trek and Star Wars? Well, the idea is that ion propulsion is an enabling technology. It allows you to move throughout the solar system with a very, very low mass fuel. You basically just use xenon gas as your fuel. The way these engines work is you use the solar panels, they generate electricity, you apply an electric field and you ionize the xenon gas. That electric field repels the ions and that produces an acceleration. And that allows you to basically push your spacecraft. The acceleration is very, very low. It compared to your car, a typical ion engine would accelerate, I believe it's 15 miles per hour per day. So to go from zero to 60 miles per hour would take four days. So very, very low acceleration, but an ion engine is something that you thrust, you power on for months at a time and that gradually builds a great Delta V, a change in velocity that accelerates you over a long period of time. So the advantage is it's a low mass fuel and that means you reduce the mass and in turn reduce the cost of your planetary mission. The disadvantage is it's gonna take longer to get where you're going than if you had a big rocket with a lot of chemical propulsion to send you out there. So the company that's building our spacecraft is Maxar Technologies, formerly known as Space Systems where they have a long history of using ion engines on Earth orbiting satellites. And you can see that in this graphic here, but they are building this as their first planetary mission in conduction with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. So we are going to send our spacecraft in the out there to Asteroid 16 Psyche and this graphic shows you the nature of the orbits that we're gonna do. When we approach the asteroid, we'll be imaging it, we're doing optical navigation to get closer and closer and image the object. And part of the reason we do that is to make sure it doesn't have any moons because if you have moons in close orbit around an asteroid, the spacecraft will have to be careful about how close it gets. That hasn't happened, asteroids do have moons. We know that, Vesta did not have any, Ceres did not have any. We don't think that Psyche will have any. But after we assure ourselves that there isn't, then we'll move into orbit A at 700 kilometers altitude. Each one of these orbits is optimized for different instruments. So orbit A is optimized for the magnetic field. We'll do our initial imaging and reconnaissance of the object before we move down into orbit B where we'll get our high resolution topography and where I will make a geological map of the surface. When we move down to orbit C, we'll do higher resolution topography and actually conduct a gravity experiment where we use the Doppler time delay and signals from the spacecraft as a spacecraft orbits and it tends to get pulled down over areas of higher mass, goes back up over areas of lower mass. You can measure that very precisely and build the gravity model of the interior of the asteroid to see if there's a mass concentration at the center. And then finally we'll change orbits down to orbit D at our lowest altitude. And this is where the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer will do their thing. Those are lower resolution image instruments so you have to get really close. So this is just another graphic and it basically is just showing you in another view of the nature of the orbits. Now, we have enough bandwidth that we're gonna be imaging at all four of these different orbits. So you see, we're gonna go from 35 meters per pixel in our first orbit all the way down to four meters per pixel. So we'll be imaging Psyche at a much, much higher spatial resolution than we ever did at Vesta or Ceres during the Dawn mission. So what instruments are we gonna take on this particular mission? I've already mentioned them but I'll just describe them again. We're taking a pair of multi-spectral imagers. We're taking two of them for redundancy, a pair of magnetometers and set in a pair of gamma ray and neutron spectrometers. So the imagers are being led by Arizona State University. They're being, the lead contractor is Melon Space Science Systems in San Diego. The purpose of these cameras is to image the surface. It's gonna have a broadband clear filter to look at the albedo and the morphology or shape of the surface. But it's also gonna have seven color filters to look at the asteroid in color. And those filters are optimized to look for silicate and sulfide minerals so we think might be on the surface. By looking at the surface from orbit looking down at different directions you can actually get a set of images and process them in a computer to make stereotopography. So we'll be able to determine mountains and basins and things like that. The magnetometer is being led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's been built by the Danish Technical University north of Copenhagen. And these are very, very sensitive magnetometers. They'll measure the magnetic field sensitivity to 0.1 nanotesla, which is very sensitive. And the idea is because this is a metallic body there's every possibility that it could have its own magnetic field preserve and we wanted to be able to measure it. So these two magnetometers are called flux gate magnetometers are gonna be on the two meter boom. The GRNS, the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer was built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University near Laurel, Maryland. This measures elemental abundance on the surface. A gamma ray spectrometer measures the amount of iron and nickel and silicon and potassium those type of elements. Whereas the neutron spectrometer measures the hydrogen abundance. And hydrogen of course is a proxy for water ice should it be there. So this will give us the elemental abundance combine that with the compositional information from the filters in the spacecraft that shall give us a first order estimate of composition. And then I've already mentioned the gravity of science experiment using the variation in the expand radio signals to determine the gravitational field of the asteroid. So this is just another view showing you where the magnetometers are located. All these instruments have high heritage from past NASA missions. The imagers with their filter wheel on it Maelyn has built these types of cameras from a lot of previous Mars missions. This is just showing the wavelengths of the different filters there. And as I said, optimized to look for sulfides like old amides, something you might expect in a planetary core looking for pyroxene and olivine typical silicate minerals. And of course a sun blocking filter to make sure that the imagers doesn't get burned out if it's accidentally look at the sun. So here's how the images will be laid down on the body in each of the four orbits. So you see that they're broad coverage in orbit A to ever increasing blanketing of the surface in the other orbits. Orbit D, we won't get global coverage of it but we'll get a little bit higher resolution in parts of the surface. And here shows you what the gamma ray and neutron spectrometers look like. Each has their own data box there. That's what those black boxes, that's where all the data goes on before it's transmitted back to Earth. And this just shows you the idea about the gravity model to determine if there's mass concentrations in the asteroid and what the gravity field will look like. So how did this whole thing begin? This whole idea to send a mission to the largest metal asteroid in the solar system. Well, the first discussions among our principal investigator, Dr. Linda Elkins-Tanthan at ASU and colleagues at JPL and other places first began you see in 2011. So they spent several years just developing the concept of it until NASA released. It wasn't until 2014 where NASA released what is called an announcement of opportunity for a discovery mission and invited people to propose all the types of mission ideas that they had. And I think they had about 28 different mission concepts proposed for that. NASA down selected to I think four mission concepts and that was in 2015. And so they gave each team a million dollars to refine the concept. And then the administrator of NASA science mission directorate looked at the results of that and selected two of them and Lucy and Psyche were the two winners. We were announced in January of 2017. So since then what's been happening are the different phases of the mission development there. So from selection there, you see phase B formulation, the preliminary design review leading to the phases C and D the actual implementation critical design review and building the spacecraft. You see I marked we are here with the arrow here in early 2022. We are right now in what is called ATLO assembly testing and launch operation. So the spacecraft is built. It's at the jet propulsion lab. It's just been through the thermal vac sequence. All of the instruments are being finely tested along with the spacecraft systems, the avionics, the computers, everything tested on the ground to get it ready to ship to the Cape at the beginning of May of this year. And then it'll be mated to this SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket for launch. The launch window opens on August 1st. And then assuming a launch is successfully we have the cruise phase phase E on the way out there. And then when we arrive at Psyche that's when the actual mission will begin. So you see this is really a long-term process getting one of these NASA missions going. So this is just a animation from Professor Eric Asfog, one of my team members on Psyche. He's a professor now at the University of Arizona just showing what one of these hit-and-run impacts might look like and how pieces might be knocked off, molten stuff that might eventually cool and crystallize to form asteroids. So this graphic here, this is an artist concept painting by Peter Rubin that we had prepared in 2017 with our thinking of what this asteroid might be. If it's actually the exposed metallic core of a planetary core that's been impacted multiple times what might geology look like on a world made out of metal? And then you see on the right there several ideas about what it could be. Could it be something that never melted as in D there? Could it be just a rubble pile of metal like in C or could it be something that's somewhat more differentiated that crystallized from the inside out or the outside in? So what have we done since then? Well, the planetary community, the astronomers, the planetary astronomers that point their telescopes up at Psyche have been studying it for the last five years trying to get a better estimate of all of its physical properties that can be measured, its effective diameter, its density and mass and the variation as such here. So based on all of the information there's a non-unique answer to it but we assume that Psyche is some amount of metal if it could have some porosity it could have some amount of non-metal component like silicate and somewhere along these lines are the possibilities of what it could be. And I don't expect you to read all this but basically it seems like it can be completely metal. There's got to be some sort of silicate material on the surface, maybe it's mixed in with the metal in the interior of the asteroid. It could have some porous space but I just read another scientific paper that just came out that they think the porous space is actually limited. So there's just a limited knowledge you can determine from telescopes. That's why we need to send a spacecraft there. We've learned more precise measurements of the thermal inertia, the resistance change in temperature, the radar albedo from looking at it with radar telescopes. So what do we think? We think Psyche's bulk density appears somewhere between 3,700 and 4,200 kilograms for cubic meter. That means it's more dense than most of the dense silicates. So there's got to be some metal in there. We think somewhere between 25 and 60 volume percent metal. The reflectance in optical properties non-uniquely indicate that it could be largely metallic but not completely. So here's two more artist concept paintings for Peter Rubin showing a more nuanced or more complex view of Psyche. So the one that's on the left shows a mostly metallic body but with more stuff on the surface. This could be silicate residue that could have fallen back after the hit and run impact, et cetera. Now the one that's on the right is that same asteroid but in this case, this is what you would call a more intimate mixture of silicate and rock, silicate rock and metal. So the two could be more combined much like you would see in a parasite meteorite where you have olivine crystals surrounded by metal. It could be something like that. We just don't know yet. So how are we gonna determine what this asteroid is? Well, there's no single measurement, no single instrument that can answer that question. What you have to do is take data from all of the different instruments we're going to interrogate this asteroid with. So if we see, you know, sulfide on the surface to different amounts, if we see certain concentrations of nickel content from various amounts, if we see magnetic fields or not, this could lead us, you know, to what this asteroid might be in terms of these various options. Here's another way. This is what you would call a decision tree. And you see whether it has a magnetic field of any kind, whether it has a certain amount of nickel content, this can lead you to possibilities. So we may not get a unique answer. The one thing I've learned in working on all those planetary missions that I've worked on is that when you actually get to a place, it's usually a major surprise, something you did not expect to find. And so it's possible that Psyche could surprise us and it could be none of the four options that I highlighted there, you know, it's going to be very interesting. Now as a geologist, I'm interested in what geology looks like on a world made out of metal. And here's an example. This is a meteoroid crater that was hit in metal was made by the vertical gun at NASA Ames Research Center where you fire a metal projectile at a metal target. And you can see there how it's made that like, that the ejecta actually froze in the metal as it was coming out. And you get that sort of a lip of the ejecta around the crater. That's something you don't see in silicate rock. Silicate rock will flop over and break and it will soon particulate ejecta downstream, but you don't see something quite like this. So impact craters could look very interesting on this body. Here, once again, is a picture of a palisite meteorite where you see the olivine crystals in here surrounded by metal. This is thought to occur near the core mantle boundary deep in the interior of an asteroid parent body. Here is what the spacecraft looks like, not quite now, it was some time ago. But here you can see these red things here. Those are the solar or electric ion propulsion, the hall thrusters. You see this panel is open with these red tanks which is going to hold the fuel. So we have the xenon for the ion propulsion to move from one planet to another and to change orbits. But there's also cold gas thrusters in there in case we need to make other movements. Here you see the jungle gem here. You see the actual two magnetometers are already installed when this photo was taken. Here's another view of the satellite there with people to scale. You see just another view. So this is where the desock, that's what the silver thing is having that installed over there. So that's where we're at right now. We're in at low and we're continuing to test to get it ready to shift to the Cape in another couple months. So let me mention about a couple of other asteroid missions that are in flight. Osiris Rex, you've probably been in following that's been led by our colleagues at the University of Arizona down in Tucson. ASU has a thermal imaging instrument on board the spacecraft. They orbited asteroid 101,955 Bennu. It orbited, it sampled it, it put the samples in a sample container, the sample container is on its way back to return samples in the Utah desert next year in 2023. Characterized primitive material from a near earth asteroid. Lucy mission launched in October of last year. My colleagues, Professors Phil Christensen and Jim Bell are co-eyes on the Lucy mission. This is going to visit the Trojan asteroids that are at Lagrange point 60 degrees in front of and behind Jupiter and it's orbit about the sun. This is going to be a 12 year mission. It's going to visit multiple Trojan asteroids out there. So I think at least six of them plus do a fly by on the way out there. So it's got a while before it's going to do its thing but it'll give us our first spacecraft closeup look at Trojan asteroids. Now, when you talk about asteroids there's a lot of talk about mining them for space resources. And asteroids do contain valuable resources to build a space-faring civilization. Just for fun, Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanthan did a calculation assuming what we know about iron meteorites and given the size of 16 psyche. If it had a composition of iron and nickel and the associated platinum group elements if it was all metal, what would it be worth? And she calculated that it was basically a hundred thousand times the gross national product of all nations on earth or 10,000 quadrillion dollars. Now that's not exactly correct because if that thing was all metal and it brought back to earth the metals market would crash and the value of that stuff would go way down. So it was just a fun little calculation. But there's companies out there like planetary resources that are actually thinking about how one would mine near earth asteroids for their space resources. And I'm sure it's not going to be as simple as this top graphic here where you pull a space station up to an asteroid and you suck it in on one side and you build out the space station components on the other. It's not going to be that simple. It's going to be very challenging for humans to live and work in microgravity of near earth asteroids. But it is very compelling to think about it because there are these resources not only on near earth asteroids they're also present on the earth moon, the iron and titanium and the lunar soils, helium-3 that's deposited from solar wind into the lunar soils. There's water ice, millions of tons of water ice in the permanently shadowed regions of craters of the earth's moon. These are the resources we're going to need to build a space-faring civilization. And we are living at the time when we're just getting started thinking about how these could be utilized for what humanity can become in terms of solar system studies. So this brings me to my final summary slide. The image that you see spinning there is the most up-to-date model of asteroid 16 Psyche. It's the shape model from the most recent set of telescopic observations. So you see that spinning there. The graphic down below is basically an albedo map. So you see that they have bright and dark features that they image on the surface and they gave them fun names there. We'll give them much better names when we actually get there with the Psyche mission. But to conclude, asteroids are the rocky remnants from the formation of the solar system. On January 4th of 2017, NASA selected Arizona State University to lead a discovery class robotic mission to the M class asteroid 16 Psyche. NASA Psyche spacecraft, just like the Dawn mission before it, will use solar electric propulsion to move through the solar system. The Psyche mission carries three distinctive instruments, visible imager magnetometer and gamma-rand neutron spectrometer, plus also we'll use the spacecraft for a gravity experiment. The Psyche spacecraft, it was built by Maxar and additional building done at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. It is currently there right now. All of the instruments and spacecraft components are being installed and tested in what we call ATLO, assembly testing and launch operations. The launch window for Psyche opens on August 1st of 2022. This year, assuming we launch successfully, that will begin a 3.4-year cruise phase to the asteroid. And once we get there, we'll do a 20-month nominal mission starting in January of 2026. So I would say stay tuned. And for my last slide, before we go to questions, I have a video here and you can see an animation of what the Psyche mission would be like. If you download this from the Psyche website, you can actually get this with some eerie sound music. But here you see, I'll just narrate the ion engine, the hull thrusters firing, the Psyche spacecraft as it approaches the asteroid. It is kind of interesting to listen to it with the music. So I'll let you guys download it. So it's gonna go into orbit and it's gonna fly around looking down, the images down, the solar panels will gimbal so that there is maybe not always but get as much sunlight as possible. You collect data on the lit up side and you transmit it back when you're on the dark side. But here you see this artist concept of the surface. We will not get down this close to fly through. This is some artistic license here. But this imagines a metal surface with bouldery rocks on the surface as you fly over it there. We actually have a PhD student I've been advising who's done a lot of work with trying to understand what regoliths would look like on a metallic object. Here you see looking down in an area as some interesting metallic rocks and as it gets in close to this, this particular hypothesis, you get the light reflecting through it there. And I think you'll see that it looks a little bit like palisite there. So there you see the olivine grain surrounded by metal. So this animation assumes it could be something like a palisite parent body. And then you see more views of it flying over the asteroid. This is where you see the distinctive metal on the surface there, giant metal boulders on the surface with gunk in between them. And we back out again. So one possible concept of what asteroid psyche might appear to be. So you can go to these websites and you should be able to download this video, this animation there. All of the images that we have available are able to do that. So let's see here. I think that's the end. Let me go back and I'll leave it there. So I will stop sharing. I will say thank you very much for your attention. And I am happy to take questions. And we have a whole lot of questions. And so let's get right to them and see how many we can get through. And so, we'll start out with a little bit of history. And so Melinda is wondering, how did it get its name? That's a good question. Generally, the names for the objects came about by the time the people who discovered them. So Anabali the Gasperus, I'm sure is the one who proposed the name from it. The theme, the planets were all named for ancient Roman gods and goddesses. So, this all comes from ancient Roman mythology. That's where a lot of these objects are named from. Nowadays, every new object that's discovered has to have its name approved by the International Astronomical Union. And that includes naming surface features on it. So, when we discover features on the surface, we're going to have to create it and follow a paradigm that the IAU is going to approve. The IAU is also the ones who approved the names for asteroids as they're discovered. You mentioned, my asteroid 10,461 D.A. Williams, they are the ones who approved that name of it, honoring me from my work on the NASA Dawn mission. Every other named object is like that. Okay, thinking about the instruments, Jeffrey asks, what is the gamma ray spectrometer looking for, radioactivity or something else? Well, yeah, when you think of gamma rays, you think of radioactivity, but what the device is is basically nuclear spectroscopy. The idea is that cosmic rays strike the planetary surface. They initiate changes in the elements. They have a signature that can be read by this particular spectrometer. What it's for is for what we call elemental abundance. So, the amount of iron, the amount of nickel, the amount of silicon, potassium, thorium, the elements of the periodic table, the major ones there are going to be able to be measured by this particular instrument. So, the gamma ray spectrometer does elemental abundance with the exception of hydrogen. Hydrogen is measured by the neutron spectrometer and that should be able to help us identify if there's any water ice on the surface. Okay, we had several people actually interested in the concept about whether or not a psyche has a moon. So it includes what would change about the mission if there was a moon. And if you did find one, is that a bonus or just a threat to the mission? I think it would probably be both. And this is an interesting question because this circumstance hasn't arisen yet. We did what are called satellite search campaigns on the Dawn mission at both Vesta and Ceres to see if those objects had any moons and they didn't. So, if we saw a moon on approach, we would image it and determine what its orbit is. And if that orbit interfered with our plan, we probably wouldn't be able to go down that far. Or maybe if we plotted it out, if we understood that orbit of that moon well enough, we might be able to redesign the orbits and be able to go down below it. I would think that they would probably be some very creative options to do that, but the circumstance has never occurred before. So I'm not sure. And thinking a little bit more about the orbits. So William asked, will Psyche's magnetic field have a measurable effect on the various orbits in particular orbit D, D orbits? That's a very good question. Matter of fact, when the mission team was grilled by NASA, they do this thing called a site visit, to grill you about your proposal. They asked, what if Psyche has a magnetic field? Is that going to affect your spacecraft in terms of its operational capabilities? And so we had to do some studies and answer that question. We believe the answer to that is no. If it does have a magnetic field, we don't think it's going to be intense enough to affect the spacecraft no matter what orbit it's in. So that's based on actual modeling studies. Okay, this is kind of an interesting question that Spencer has. Would you want to silicate content great enough to help melt and purify the metal content for some sort of manufacturing of objects? I'm guessing this has to do with a commercial utilization of the asteroids. Yeah, excellent question. I really don't know the answer to it, but I will say this. Mining really isn't a part of the objective of the Psyche mission. It's more of a orbital reconnaissance and identify what it is there. If we think that there is evidence that there's something really remarkable there that would be of value economically in the future, then that would be something that would want to be assessed by a future mission. I would point out though that here on Earth, we can mine iron and nickel and platinum group elements much more accost effectively than we can on any of these asteroids at least right now. So unless there's something really remarkable there, it's going to take quite an effort to be able to do that. And it's also going to take quite a bit of time. I mean, I think it's going to take decades to figure out how to utilize that type of material. Okay, Gregory asked this a good question. The artist's interpretation showed that there are two large craters next to each other on the asteroid. What's the rationale for that? Or what was, did you have evidence and to demonstrate that you do have these two large craters? Yep, that comes from Earth-based telescopic observations, the shape models. If you've looked at it, you see that those two big, impacts are there. So we know that there's those two rather large impacts, our actual features there. We can tell that from Earth-based telescopes. So I'm interested to see what they're going to look like up close when we can actually get there. Michael was interested in the laser communication aspect. Could you say something a little bit more about that? Sure, NASA has been trying to investigate whether there's a more effective way to communicate information besides our standard X and K-A band radio telescope method that the Deep Space Network uses to communicate, basically from all of the spacecraft in our solar system back to Earth. And one of the ideas was the idea of using a laser beam to communicate information. So they came up with this Pathfinder, this experiment technology demo, if you will, and they call it DSOT, Deep Space Optical Communication. So what they've done, there's a transmitter and receiver on board the Psyche spacecraft. And there's also a transmitter receiver. I think they've installed it on the Hale telescope there, which I believe that's at Mount Palomar in California. And so they'll be using transmitting that from that telescope up to the Psyche spacecraft. And then the Psyche spacecraft will receive it and then transmit data back to Earth. And they're going to take these attempts successively as the Psyche spacecraft, does a spiral orbit out further and further all the way to Mars and then out a little bit further. And that's the goal of the experiment here. So I think they've tried this between the ground and the International Space Station, but we haven't tried it any further than that. So this will be the first attempt to try and use this new form of communication and see how well it works. Okay, so I think we'll do two more questions. I apologize in advance if yours isn't one of them. How many people, you know, this is something that we're always interested in. I know one of the projects we had here had to do with all of the people that go into a mission and go into exploration. And so the question is, how many people are involved in the planning and the execution of a mission like Psyche? A lot. Our Psyche mission, you know, most missions in the past, they have a science team that analyzes the data after it's acquired and then an engineering team that designs and builds the spacecraft. And that in the past, the two have been very separate, if you will. But on the Psyche mission, our PI very strongly believes in an integrated team and scientists and engineers working together. Matter of fact, this is part of the goal of our School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU where we train our students. They all have to have a little bit knowledge, you know, engineers with the knowledge of science, scientists with a little bit of knowledge of engineering as they move their respective degree programs. So on Psyche, we've had both the engineers and the scientists together and we tend to alternate presentations and engineering than a science than engineering and a science at our team meetings. We don't have a separate engineering team and a science team, we just have one Psyche team and we do that. But there's literally hundreds of people from all of the people at the Jet Propulsion Lab and it maxed our technologies and all of the subcontractors who built the components that go into all of the instruments and equipment. So it's a very large, we're talking at least several hundred. A last question. And so Melinda said that she hears that there's an asteroid or something headed towards Earth on this Friday. And it made me think, well, how is this mission helping us with protecting Earth from future potential impacts? I think the closest that this particular mission will be able to do will be to characterize a type of asteroid that we haven't seen before but we know it makes it a major component of our meteorite collection and that's the iron meteorites. It's most likely I think that 16 Psyche is a parent body of at least some or maybe one family of iron meteorites. So we'll get a much better understanding of what this kind of meteorite parent body is like. Is it a rubble pile or is it a consolidated asteroid? What is this density? What is this composition? In terms of protecting the Earth, what we call planetary defense, we also have in flight a mission that was launched in, I believe, November or early December called DART, the double asteroid redirection test. And this is gonna be the first robotic mission that actually directly addresses planetary defense. And the idea is this spacecraft, which also contains a CubeSat with a separate imager is going to visit a near-Earth asteroid that has a moon. And that moon is as well-known orbit. What they're gonna do, they're gonna fly an impactor into that asteroid moon with just enough force that should be able to alter its orbit in a way. It won't free it. And these asteroids are no danger to the Earth right now. But we need to understand whether a kinetic impact can actually alter the trajectory of an asteroid because if at some point in the future, there is an asteroid that could be on a collision course with Earth, this may be the solution. Because if you can intercept it when it is far out there and it only takes a very small amount of energy through a kinetic impact and it will divert it just enough to miss the Earth entirely. So the DART mission is the first one that's actually going to address planetary defense. And that's all gonna happen later this year. I think that that's gonna happen in October and November of this year. Oh, and let me just, since I saw Paul from here in Phoenix asked a question about the extended mission. After we complete our nominal mission at Psyche, assuming that we have enough fuel and resources on board the spacecraft and everything still works, NASA typically will fund us to do an extended mission for some amount of time. It could be a year or two years or something. And depending on what we discover at Psyche, we would either stay at Psyche, drop even lower, get more data or depending on how much resources there are, we could leave Psyche and visit another body in the solar system, maybe do a fast fly by or something. That is something that won't be determined until and unless we successfully do our nominal mission at Psyche. So that's the answer to what happens afterwards. Great. And of course, I guess thinking about planetary defense is that all asteroids are a little bit different. They're not all the same. And so if we can learn how to characterize the different classes of them, this mission will accomplish a great deal, you know? That was definitely the advantage of both the Hayabusa II and Osiris Rex because the two nearest asteroids they studied were rubble piles. We saw these rubble piles up close and sampled them both. And that was different than the, all of the asteroids that were studied from Gaspra all the way up to those two were all appeared to be solid body objects, that those were the first two rubble piles. And now with Psyche, we'll understand what an M class asteroid is like. And with Lucy, we'll understand what D and P class asteroids are like. So we're slowly working our way through all of the different types of unknown real estate left in the solar system. All right. Well, that's all for tonight. Thank you very much, David, for joining us this evening. And thank you everyone for tuning in. Join us for our next webinar on Tuesday, March 15th. That's only four weeks from tonight when Anita Day and Holly Ryer from the Space Telescope Science Institute will share with us how you and your local clubs can get involved with the release of the first images from the web telescope. You can find an archive of these webinars of the Night Sky Network website in the Outreach Resources section. Each webinar's page also features additional resources and activities. You can also find these webinars in the Night Sky Network YouTube channel, including one, I think it might have been October. Maybe it was earlier this last fall, on the dark mission. And so you can find that there and go back and get some more details about that. So keep looking up and we will see you all next month. Good night, everyone. Thank you, everybody. Good night. I love it. Well, they seem to like it. There's lots of thank yous in there. Oh, there are. Everyone is always appreciative of these. I feel like the last year or so, we've kind of had a tour of the...