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I remember two Voyager missions launched in 1977.
Shortly after launch, they turned around.
They got the earth and the moon in the same picture.
I've just been fascinated with imaging
from deep space missions ever since,
and I've been very fortunate to be able
to create some of those pictures.
- Psyche is what’s called an M-class asteroid
in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
- It's the 16th asteroid discovered back in the 19th century.
And we think that maybe
it's the remnants of a planetary core.
- All of the missions I've worked on
had some sort of an imaging device.
- Isn't that the first question that everyone asks?
What does it look like?
And so I've been dreaming
about this object now for over a decade.
And by then it'll be two decades I’ve been
dreaming about this object,
and then to see what it really looks like.
What's more exciting than that?
- For Psyche, we know it's going to be a relatively dark object.
So we have to have an instrument
that can see in that sensitivity
with the dark surface and still be able
to resolve the features that we're looking at.
- The cameras on Psyche, we call them the
Psyche multispectral imagers.
They're a pair of identical cameras.
They're a pair for redundancy
just in case we have a problem with one,
we've got the other one.
- And with stereo, we can build
what's called a digital terrain model,
the surface of Psyche, which we're very interested
in knowing at a high resolution.
- Using the different filters, we actually can
infer geochemistry of the surface.
We can also associate it with
the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer data set
to sort of really drilll down into
the composition of the asteroid.
- We'll also take pictures farther out into the
infrared, where the sensors are still sensitive
and where we can get a little bit more information
about the kinds of rocks and minerals on the surface.
One of the other functions besides science
for the cameras is that they are our
navigation cameras as well.
This technique that was invented
back in the 70’s called optical navigation,
take pictures of stars and star fields,
kind of like looking at a sextant on a ship
hundreds of years ago.
That same process is used in modern space
missions as well.
- The instruments actually being built by a company
called Malin Space Science Systems.
They built the LRO camera.
They built MASTCAM, they built MASTCAM-Z.
They've built numerous other cameras
that are flown to Mars,
and they do the final fabrication
quality control before then delivering that instrument to JPL.
- No deep space camera system like this
has ever been built.
However, the components that go into the cameras
all have a lot of experience in space.
A lot of what NASA calls heritage.
- When we get to Psyche we’ll go into orbit.
The imager will primarily work during Orbits A and B
to get the images to characterize the surface
features, to make the topographic map,
and to get the color images which will hint
at the composition.
- Standard plan is that we’re pointed straight down
and we’re snapping pictures
as the asteroid rotates underneath them.
- Usually the most important image
that everybody gets excited is that first image
that we acquire that you get back.
- We are super committed on the Psyche project
from P.I. Lindy Elkins-Tanton,
and all the way down to sharing
this experience with the public.
I think the only thing we know and that's,
you know, based on, you know, NASA's 50-60 year
experience now is it is not gonna look like
what we think it's gonna look like.
And it's going to be really interesting
whatever we find.