The Arizona State University-led mission to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche passed a key milestone this week: The university’s imager captured its first pictures – a moment known as “first light.”
“It's so important,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president for ASU’s Interplanetary Initiative and Psyche mission lead. “And you can imagine how nerve-wracking it is: You spend all these years building this camera so we can show people what it looks like where we're going in space, but you're not ever really sure it's going to work ‘til it works. And that's first light.”
After spending two weeks “baking out” any residual moisture from Earth, Psyche’s multispectral imager performed without a hitch, snapping 68 pictures of a star field in the constellation Pisces.
But the communication lag caused by a 6-million-mile (26-million-kilometer) gap between the craft and mission control caused a few minutes of hand-wringing first.
“It was so exciting to listen to the commands go up through the Deep Space Network via radio to the spacecraft and have it happen,” said Elkins-Tanton.
The photos will be used for calibration and data verification.
Once the spacecraft reaches the asteroid, the cameras will take pictures through various color filters (also tested) covering wavelengths both visible and invisible to the human eye. The data will help scientists uncover the asteroid’s composition and inform 3-D maps of the asteroid’s geology.
The test of the imager, which was designed and built by ASU and Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, is the latest in a series of successful data and sensor checks. They included a magnetometer and the first-ever Hall-effect thrusters used in deep space.
Hall-effect thrusters are a highly efficient form of propulsion that uses an electric field to ionize fuel (typically a noble gas like xenon) and a magnetic field to direct the resulting plasma into thrust.
The craft, which launched on Oct. 13, will reach the asteroid Psyche in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in 2029.
It will also take test images of Mars during the spacecraft’s flyby in 2026.
