Uploaded September 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Meet Ben Inouye, a power system engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Inouye, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains what it was like to build the spacecraft’s power system. Inouye talks about the importance of the power system, as well as his passion for astrophotography.
Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.
This is the third episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission.
Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Learn all about our first-of-its-kind #MissionToPsyche at: jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche
Credit: NASA
Produced by: NASA 360 Productions
Meet Ben Inouye, a power system engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Inouye, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains what it was like to build the spacecraft’s power system. Inouye talks about the importance of the power system, as well as his passion for astrophotography.
Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system.
This is the third episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission.
Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.
Learn all about our first-of-its-kind #MissionToPsyche at: jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche
Credit: NASA
Produced by: NASA 360 Productions
