The probe Psyche NASA’s mission is to approach the asteroid Psyche 16 rich in metals and to bring information that will be useful to a subsequent exploitation of the mining wealth of space.
Its journey started in October 2023 thanks to a rocket Falcon Heavy But it will be necessary to wait until 2029 before it reached its destination. Meanwhile, it must use the gravity of the planet Mars to propel itself to the asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
Explore a metal asteroid and test the DSOC
It is not her only mission since she also has elements of broadband communication by laser from distant space, or DSOC (Deep Space Optical Communications), which will notably create a high speed communication channel between the land and Mars useful for the colonization of the red planet.
The latest trials had made it possible to establish a communication more than 460 million kilometers from the earth while trials at just over 50 million kilometers, the distance when the Earth and Mars are closest, made it possible to reach flows of several hundred Mbps.
If Mars may have broadband thanks to this method, the rest of the journey of the psyche probe to the asteroid has just complicated. NASA announced that it had detected pressure on April 1 in the Xenon circuit supplying its propellants, of the order of 26 psi (or 1.8 bar).
-Lack of Xenon pressure, should you worry?
The propellants are electric and supplied by the energy of solar panels. This energy is used to expel ions from xenon, neutral gas, and this expulsion makes it possible to guide the probe and modify its trajectory to reach its destination, according to the principle of Hall effect propellant.
The propellants were stopped while understanding the origin of this drop in pressure in the Xenon circuit. NASA engineers have a little time to conduct their investigations, the probe does not need trajectory correction until mid-June.
The propellants being fed by two xenon lines, it remains possible to fall back on the second line to operate despite the propellants. This highlights the importance of system redundancy.
The psyche probe is currently 238 kilometers from the earth, but in the spring of 2026 its gravitational assistance maneuver around Mars in the spring of 2026 to reach the asteroid psyche in 2029.
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