NASA halted the asteroid’s mission on Friday, blaming the late delivery of its own navigation software.
The Psyche mission to a strange metal asteroid of the same name was to launch this September or October. But the agency’s jet lab was several months late in delivering its navigation, guidance and control software, a crucial part of any spacecraft. Engineers “just ran out of time” to test it, officials said Friday.
Now the space agency will step down and an independent review will look into what went wrong, when the spacecraft could launch again and even if it has to move forward, said NASA’s head of planetary science Lori Glaze.
NASA has already spent $ 717 million on Psyche, and its estimated total cost, including the rocket for its launch, is $ 985 million. Initially, the small spacecraft the size of a car was supposed to arrive at its asteroid in 2026 after traveling more than 1 billion miles.
Now that the software has been delivered, there are no known problems with the spacecraft, other than “we just failed to test it,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a leading scientist on the Psyche mission.
“There is a challenge that we could not overcome in time to start with confidence in 2022,” she said.
There are still at least two possibilities for launching next year and more in 2024 to reach the asteroid, which is in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, said JPL director Lori Leshin. This means that Psyche will not reach its asteroid until 2029 or 2030.
But calculating launch time is complicated because the mission needs proper sunlight conditions and the asteroid “spins like a grilled chicken instead of a peak,” Elkins-Tanton said.
Two other small missions would be launched with the heavy SpaceX Falcon rocket, and NASA is watching what will happen to them.
Psyche is simply the latest in NASA’s fleet of asteroid spacecraft. Osiris-Rex is on his way back to Earth with the wreckage of the asteroid Benu. Last year, NASA launched the Lucy and Darth spacecraft to explore other space rocks and see if a rocket could deflect an asteroid heading toward Earth.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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