Psyche Liftoff

A side booster from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket comes in for a successful landing at the company’s landing zone at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, just minutes after NASA’s Psyche launch from Kennedy Space Center. The Psyche mission will study a metal-rich asteroid with the same name, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This is NASA’s first mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice. Riding with Psyche is a pioneering technology demonstration – NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment – which will be the first test of laser communications beyond the Moon.