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NASA Invites Media to Psyche Launch, Mission will Study an Asteroid
Media accreditation is now open for the upcoming launch of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, for a mission to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 10:38 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 5, for launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Media accreditation deadlines for the Psyche launch are as follows:
- U.S. media and U.S. citizens representing international media must apply by 5 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 12.
- International media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 29.
Media accreditation requests should be submitted online at:
A copy of NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. For questions about accreditation, please email: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov. For other mission questions, please contact NASA Kennedy’s newsroom: 321-867-2468.
The asteroid Psyche may be part of a core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet. Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets – including Earth – scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets’ rocky mantles and crusts. Psyche will offer a unique window into the process that created terrestrial planets.
NASA will post updates on launch preparations to prepare the spacecraft for its 2.5-billion-mile (4-billion-kilometer) journey on the Psyche blog. Riding with Psyche is a pioneering technology demonstration, called NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which will be NASA’s furthest-ever test of high-bandwidth optical communications.
Para obtener información sobre cobertura en español en el Centro Espacial Kennedy o si desea solicitar entrevistas en español, comuníquese con Antonia Jaramillo at: antonia.jaramillobotero@nasa.gov, 321-501-8425, o Messod Bendayan, 256-930-1371.
For more information about Psyche and DSOC, visit:
Source: NASA