Falcon Heavy Launches NASA’s Psyche Asteroid Probe

On Friday, October 13 at 10:19 a.m. ET, Falcon Heavy launched NASA's Psyche mission to an interplanetary transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the fourth launch for the side boosters, both of which previously supported the USSF-44, USSF-67, and Hughes JUPTER 3 missions.

The Psyche spacecraft will travel to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Mars in pursuit of studying the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system. The mission will also demonstrate NASA’s first deep space test of the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system – high-bandwidth optical communications through space and back to Earth – from distances far exceeding the Moon – using a near-infrared laser.

Falcon Heavy is composed of three reusable Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft. As one of the world’s most powerful operational rockets, Falcon Heavy can lift nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lbs) to orbit.

Psyche is a space mission launched on October 13, 2023 to explore the origin of planetary cores by orbiting and studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche.Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University is the principal investigator who proposed this mission for NASA's Discovery Program. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the project.

Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid, and was once thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet, the remnant of a violent collision with another object that stripped off its mantle and crust. Numerous recent studies have ruled that out. Radar observations of the asteroid from Earth indicate an iron–nickel composition. On January 4, 2017, the Psyche mission was selected for NASA's Discovery #14 mission,and launch was scheduled for no earlier than September 20, 2022, but the Psyche launch was postponed.