Psyche at Sunset

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft stands tall atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A in Florida on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Liftoff of Psyche is targeted for 10:19 a.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 13. The mission will explore an asteroid that scientists hope will help solve mysteries of our solar system for the benefit of humanity. This includes, for the first time, examining a world dominantly made not of rock or ice, but of metal, to answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system. Psyche also will carry a technology demonstration – NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment – that will test a next-generation way to communicate from space.