It may be Friday the 13th, but the news has been positive about the Psyche spacecraft, which earlier today successfully launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Here is part of a statement by Arizona State University Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Psyche mission, from back in 2017 as she awaited word on whether the Psyche mission had been green-lighted by NASA:
I’ve only been working on this project for five and a half years. Some of my competitors have been through the process before with the same ideas, and are coming up on a decade of trying to fly their concept. Still, five and a half years. About 150 people have worked on this concept with me. We’ve written about 2,000 pages, including the step 1 and step 2 proposals and all the written, edited, revised, formatted, and published answers to questions that came in between. We have art and models and videos and new scientific and engineering results because of all our efforts to understand how to get to the metal world Psyche and what we might find if we did, and how we could measure it and send the information back to Earth and understand it and interpret it for everyone in the world.
To say our hearts are in this project would be too facile, too surficial, too trite. We have lived and breathed this. We know and love each other and we know each other’s families and we have learned when to be quiet and let the other person work through a peak of frustration late at night after no rest for weeks. We have sweated through countless reviews and celebrated with numerous cakes and dinners the many intermediate successes that allowed us to get here, the ultimate intermediate success, the privilege to wait for the phone call.
Here is PI Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s quote from earlier today:
We said ‘goodbye’ to our spacecraft, the center of so many work lives for so many years – thousands of people and a decade…But it’s really not a finish line; it’s a starting line for the next marathon. Our spacecraft is off to meet our asteroid, and we’ll fill another gap in our knowledge – and color in another kind of world in our solar system.
Congratulations to PI Lindy Elkins-Tanton and her team on a job well done (so far, of course).
Our Awesome Universe 