The Psyche spacecraft was launched almost two years ago and is now on its way to meet a unique asteroid in an attempt to understand the origin of the Earth. Although it is still several years away from orbiting the asteroid of the same name, the Psyche mission experienced a problem with its propulsion system that forced it to shut down its engines.
NASA engineers on the Psyche mission are investigating the root cause of the recent drop in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, a problem that must be resolved by mid-June so that it does not affect the mission’s flight path. “The mission team has decided to postpone thrusting while engineers work to understand the cause of the pressure drop,” NASA said in a statement.
Psyche launched in October 2023, beginning a 2.2 billion mile journey to a metal-rich asteroid located in the main belt. The spacecraft began firing its engines in May 2024, using a solar electric propulsion system that relies on solar power to generate power for four electric motors. According to NASA, on April 1, the spacecraft detected a drop in pressure in the pipeline supplying xenon gas to the engines, which dropped from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi. In response to the sudden drop, the spacecraft automatically shut down the engines.
The mission can keep the engines off for another month and a half until it is too late – when the probe will need to adjust its trajectory. While NASA’s team of engineers is investigating what could have caused the drop in fuel pressure, they are also considering switching to a backup fuel line to get the spacecraft’s engines back online.
If all goes well, the spacecraft will enter the orbit of the asteroid Psyche in late July 2029 and begin its mission in August of the same year. The mission is scheduled for the spring of 2026, when it will fly past Mars, using the planet’s gravitational pull to guide it toward the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Psyche is a 140-mile-wide (226 kilometers) asteroid that may be a fragment of the core of a collapsed planetesimal, one of the building blocks that come together to form a planet.
The mission has been in preparation for a long time and has faced many challenges. Psyche was originally scheduled to launch in 2022, but a problem with the spacecraft’s software delayed the mission until the next launch next year. The software controls the spacecraft’s orientation and flight path, as well as its ability to send and receive data to Earth. A week before the scheduled launch date of October 5, 2023, engineers discovered a problem with the Psyche spacecraft’s engines that could have caused it to overheat during its eight-year mission. As a result, the mission’s launch date was postponed for a week while the team solved the problem.
NASA representatives do not seem to be too concerned about this problem. “These things do happen, and that’s why we build redundancy into our missions,” said Louise Procter, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, during a meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Review Group on Wednesday, SpaceNews reports. “We don’t have any concerns about that at this time, but we’re certainly keeping an eye on it.”
