Psyche Mission

On Friday, October 13 at 10:19 a.m. ET, Falcon Heavy launched NASA's Psyche mission to an interplanetary transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the fourth launch for the side boosters, both of which previously supported the USSF-44, USSF-67, and Hughes JUPTER 3 missions.

The Psyche spacecraft will travel to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Mars in pursuit of studying the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system. The mission will also demonstrate NASA’s first deep space test of the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system high-bandwidth optical communications through space and back to Earth from distances far exceeding the Moon using a near-infrared laser.