Quote:CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — NASA's Psyche spacecraft launched this morning (Oct. 13) from Pad 39A here at the agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The asteroid-bound probe lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, marking a list of firsts for NASA and the launch vehicle.

Not including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, which launched past the orbit of Mars on Falcon Heavy’s debut test flight in February 2018, Psyche is the rocket’s first official interplanetary mission. It is also the first NASA mission to launch on a Falcon Heavy.

Liftoff occurred at today 10:19 a.m. EDT (1419 GMT). The triple-booster rocket ignited all 27 of its first-stage Merlin engines, which produce up to 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, lofting Psyche skyward to begin its 2.2 billion-mile (3.5 billion kilometers) journey to its celestial namesake, a bizarre metallic space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Psyche marked the fourth launch for each of these side boosters, which will be refurbished to fly on future Falcon Heavy flights. One of those flights is among a list of several contracted for upcoming NASA missions. During a prelaunch press conference on Wednesday (Oct. 11), Tim Dunn, senior launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program, said that the side boosters flown on Psyche will be reused on a Department of Defense (DoD) launch later this fall, and then again in 2024 on the Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.

Psyche is headed for an asteroid of the same name, officially designated 16 Psyche. Of nine metal-rich asteroids known to exist in our solar system, Psyche is the biggest, Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, said during Wednesday’s briefing.

"Psyche is by far the largest, and that's why we want to go to it," Fox said, "because the smaller ones are more likely to have been changed by things impacting them, whereas the big one, we think, is going to be completely unchanged."

At its widest, the asteroid measures 173 miles (280 km) across and 144 miles (232 km) long, according to NASA’s website. For scale, that's larger than the state of Connecticut. Scientists don’t know exactly what 16 Psyche looks like, but they have been able to determine that its surface is covered mostly in nickel and iron. The asteroid is believed to be an ancient protoplanetary core, and researchers hope an up-close examination of the metal space rock could teach us more about planet formation.



The spacecraft won't rendezvous with 16 Psyche until July 2029. On the way, the probe will steal some of Mars' gravitational energy when it performs a flyby of the Red Planet for a velocity boost in May 2026. After flying for 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km), Psyche will enter orbit around its target asteroid, where it will spend about a month undergoing systems checks and calibrations to prepare to begin its operational mission.

Beginning in August 2029, Psyche will spend 21 months mapping and analyzing the asteroid's surface from multiple orbits.

NASA's Psyche probe