NASA suspended an asteroid mission on Friday, blaming the late delivery of its own navigation software.
The Psyche mission to a strange metallic asteroid of the same name was to be launched this September or October. But the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab took a few months to deliver its software for navigation, orientation and control, a crucial part of any spacecraft. Engineers “just ran out of time” to test it, officials said Friday.
Now, the space agency will take a step back and an independent review will look at what has failed, when the spacecraft could launch again and even if it has to move forward, said NASA’s head of planetary science, Lori Glaze.
NASA has already spent $ 717 million on Psyche and its total estimated cost, including the rocket to launch it, is $ 985 million. The small spacecraft the size of a car was originally supposed to reach its asteroid in 2026 after a journey of more than a billion miles.
Now that the software has been delivered, there are no known issues with the spacecraft, except “we couldn’t test it,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, chief scientist on the Psyche mission.
“There is a challenge that we have not been able to overcome in time to launch it in 2022 with confidence,” he said.
There are still at least two launch opportunities next year and more in 2024 to reach the asteroid that lies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, said JPL director Laurie Leshin. This means that Psyche would not reach its asteroid until 2029 or 2030.
But calculating launch times is tricky because the mission needs the right conditions of sunlight and the asteroid “is spinning like a roast chicken instead of like a lid,” Elkins-Tanton said.
Two other small missions were going to travel on the SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket and NASA is looking at what will happen to these.
Psyche is just the latest in NASA’s fleet of asteroid exploration spacecraft. Osiris-Rex returns to Earth with ruins of the asteroid Bennu. Last year, NASA launched the Lucy and Dart spacecraft to explore other spacecraft and test whether a rocket could deflect the course of an asteroid heading for Earth.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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